


You Were a Kindness When I Was a Stranger

by napricot



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Flashbacks, Natasha-centric, Non-Linear Flashbacks, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room, myth adaptation, road trip of revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-21 14:00:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 50,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4831688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napricot/pseuds/napricot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha thought the Winter Soldier was not her problem. Standing in front of the Bucky Barnes portion of the Smithsonian exhibit, she had to admit the Winter Soldier was at least a little bit her problem, if only because Steve was so thoroughly compromised when it came to him. She just wasn’t prepared for how very much the Winter Soldier was her problem too.</p>
<p>In which Natasha is Psyche, and Bucky is Eros, kind of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The National's ["You Were a Kindness."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwlPeW2eBHw) Thank you again to hoekitchen for the beta! 
> 
> This fic started as me attempting to write a Buckynat version of the story of Psyche and Eros. It wandered a little far afield of that frame, so I'm not sure if this counts as more of a remix of the myth at this point, or just an allusion or inspiration. 
> 
> Standard warnings for Red Room-adjacent horrors, including violence against children by children and implied dubcon mentioned very briefly in passing. I've given Natasha a mashup of her 616 and MCU backgrounds here, and I started writing this before AOU, so this is obviously not Age of Ultron-compliant.
> 
> This is complete except for a short epilogue, which should go up in the next few days.

In the wake of SHIELD’s spectacular implosion, Natasha had a lot of balls in the air. She had blown all her covers wide open, had laid her grisly past bare, had testified before Congress for fuck’s sake, and she had done it all while helping Maria and Nick run frantic damage control for compromised SHIELD agents and operations, and while trying to keep Steve from flinging his injured ass right back into the line of fire. She hadn’t spared much thought for the Winter Soldier nee James Buchanan Barnes once she had confirmed that he was in the wind and not likely to make another try at killing Steve, because quite frankly, she had _priorities_. 

She had tried to express this to Steve as gently as possible, because he was still in the hospital and all, but Steve was predictably implacable.

“Please, Natasha. Anything you can find on the Winter Soldier, anything your contacts know. I have to find Bucky. I have to—” Steve’s voice had broken, unwilling or unable to finish the sentence. “Please.” 

If the circumstances had been different, Natasha would have pushed for more information, more emotion, more _something_. In all the time they had worked together, Steve had held his griefs close, had hoarded them, and no grief more so than that for his best friend Bucky Barnes. Steve would occasionally mention the other men from his unit, and Natasha had even gotten him to talk about Peggy Carter a little. But when it came to Bucky Barnes, Steve clammed up and shut down. Here was an opportunity to learn more, but—well, Natasha tried not to interrogate her friends. She had precious few of them.

So she reshuffled her priorities, dumped some damage control on Sharon, and went in search of the Winter Soldier’s file. It wasn’t precisely _easy_ , and she had to call in a few favors she’d have preferred to hold in reserve, but she had the file for Steve by the time he got discharged from the hospital and the worst of the SHIELD furor had died down. She had been ready to call it a job well done, to hand the file off and leave Steve to his wild goose chase.  

But then she’d read it. The file was of course full of unspeakable horrors, all set out in clinical tones. They were things no graduate of the Red Room could ever be entirely surprised by, but the file was horrifying all the same. She tried to look at it through Steve’s eyes, to imagine what it would be like to know your oldest and best friend had been unmade. Her only point of comparison was Clint’s experience with Loki. That had been difficult enough, and it had only been a few days. She flipped the pages back to the photo of Barnes in his army uniform. The contrast between the young and bright-eyed Sergeant Barnes and the Winter Soldier was stark. 

Reasoning that she was just doing her due diligence, she looked up Barnes’ file too. She’d read his SSR file back when Steve had first started working with SHIELD, with an eye towards gauging how Steve would use Clint in the field. Barnes and Barton had similar skill sets after all. She went over it again now, focusing on teasing out who Barnes had been. There wasn’t much there: he was declared fit for duty after his time as a POW, and there was no hint that Zola’s experimentation had yielded results. If you read between the lines of the dry mission reports, there was some suggestion of the sorts of shenanigans the Howling Commandos had gotten up to, but either the more interesting stuff had been lost to history or never recorded in the first place. 

She switched to what the history books had made of Barnes, but beyond the basic facts of Barnes’ pre-war life, it was hard to make out anything of the man he had actually been behind the hagiographies of Captain America’s best friend. Barnes, like Captain America, had been turned into something of a symbol. The devoted, loyal soldier and sidekick to Captain America, the only Howling Commando to die in battle, heroic and dutiful favored son of Brooklyn: none of it seemed untrue, but none of it felt quite real enough either.

So Natasha chased the ghost of Bucky Barnes to the Smithsonian. Steve had insisted that the Winter Soldier had known him during their last fight, and if he had questions about his past, he might head to the Captain America exhibit. She didn’t spot him in the sparse crowds now, but she’d keep an eye on the security footage for the next few weeks just in case. Or she’d tell someone else to keep an eye on the security footage. Because the Winter Soldier was not her problem. Standing in front of the Bucky Barnes portion of the exhibit, she had to admit the Winter Soldier was at least a little bit her problem, if only because Steve was so thoroughly compromised when it came to him. She just wasn’t prepared for how very much the Winter Soldier was her problem too.

The exhibit rehashed the things she had already learned about Barnes and packaged it all into an easily digestible sad and patriotic story. She was about to write the whole thing off when a bit of silent, black and white film footage of Steve and Barnes caught her attention. At first, she could only focus on Steve’s smile: it was wide and unforced, happier by orders of magnitude than the wry grins she was used to seeing. This smile wasn’t a sight Natasha had seen often, if ever. But it was when Natasha focused on Barnes that the axis of her world shifted. Barnes was smiling too, bright as sunshine, and the short loop of film caught him in what was obviously a laugh. And Natasha knew, knew abruptly and totally, exactly what that laugh sounded like. A torrent of sense memory overtook her: the sound of his laugh, the exact illuminated blue-gray color of his eyes, the timbre of his voice, the feeling of cool metal fingers on the bare skin of her lower back. 

This had happened to her before. The sight of a dancer’s ballet shoes had brought up the vivid memory of breaking in a pair of ballet shoes and the heavy thump of ballerinas’ feet on hardwood floors. Any number of fights and kills had called up echoes of similar experiences that may or may not have actually happened. In the Red Room, she had been unmade and remade and had made herself with the tatters of what was left. The memories were just the leftovers, most of them false or implanted. She knew that. 

After one last frozen moment staring at Barnes’ smile, she turned around and left the museum. She’d give Steve the file and be done with it. The Winter Soldier was not her problem.

* * *

 

She left Steve with the Winter Soldier file and a kiss on the cheek, and did not ask him what the exact color of Bucky Barnes’ eyes was when he laughed, or what rifle Barnes preferred, or if he was ticklish on that one spot just under his ribs. She told Steve he might not want to pull on the thread of the Winter Soldier’s file, and silently resolved that she would not pull on the threads of these sudden memories. They were surfacing like the lyrics to songs she hadn’t thought she’d known, automatic and unbidden. But they were probably just…projection or transference or something. Maybe she should have paid more attention in SHIELD-mandated therapy, she thought. Impossible memories or not though, she had a plan to stick to: all her covers were blown, and she needed to either build some new ones or finally settle on figuring out who she was without them, preferably while cleaning up the mess of SHIELD/HYDRA. She had to set the Winter Soldier aside and leave him to Steve and Sam.

Her subconscious was not on board with this resolution. Every night, her dreams were a parade of confusing images of Barnes or the Winter Soldier, a jumbled up mixture of fighting or fucking, or fighting and fucking, she couldn’t always tell which was which. When she was awake, she found herself thinking of the Red Room more than she had in years. She had wanted to leave it behind, after defecting to SHIELD. She had gone through the deprogramming and the mandated therapy and the evaluations and the careful probationary period when only Clint had treated her like a fellow agent and fuckup while everyone else but Fury had looked at her like she was the dangerous wild animal Clint had cajoled to stay. She had given up any hope of filling in the holes in her memory. She had wanted to leave all that behind. But now it was plastered across the internet for everyone to see. And the ledger of sins she had worked so hard to balance was full of more red than even she had reckoned, if SHIELD had been so thoroughly compromised by HYDRA all this time.

It left her edgy and unsettled, more certain than ever that it was obvious that she was just a matryoshka doll, a series of pretty outsides and hollow insides that grew progressively smaller and smaller until there was nothing left. Fuck self-discovery, she thought, it clearly wasn’t leading anywhere good.Clint could probably use an extraction.

* * *

 

Clint did indeed need an extraction from his longterm undercover mission in Ukraine. Granted, that was kind of her fault. In her defense, she had managed to give him a heads up before the Triskelion went down in literal flames. Clint was not moved by this as she untied and ungagged him. 

“Are you kidding me, Tasha!? You wikileaked—” She stuffed the gag back in his mouth and handed him a gun before turning to take on the guards. Clint glared and spat the gag back out, but he took the hint and they fell into their usual easy fighting rhythm. A ghost of a memory flared weakly in her mind for a moment, of doing this with someone taller. She shoved it aside; it wasn’t relevant.

Apparently, she wasn’t the only one escaping unwelcome self-reflection via work, because they met Fury on their way out. He gave her a rather unimpressed look, but really. He shouldn’t be surprised that she came to pull Clint’s ass out of a fire she had helped set. Fury’s help was welcome though, and the rest of the extraction went smoothly with the extra set of hands. They left the mess for Interpol to clean up and headed to an off-the-books safe house. No one said anything that wasn’t required by the mission. 

The safe house was dusty and mostly empty, but the taps still ran and the electricity was on. Natasha cleared the whole house and checked the perimeter before joining Clint and Fury in the kitchen. Fury had pulled an ancient first aid kit from somewhere and started patching Clint up. Natasha left them to it, and rummaged through the cabinets until she found a few chipped mugs and glasses, and filled them with water. She gulped down a full glass herself before setting two in front of Clint and Fury and joining them at the rickety table.

Clint downed his own glass of water, and then, after a moment of tense stillness, flung it with force against the opposite wall. Natasha didn’t flinch, but it was a close thing. The sound of shattering glass almost echoed in the silence.

“Fucking HYDRA, the whole time, it was—”

“Not all of it, Barton. I promise you, both of you, it wasn’t all—”

“Well then feel fucking free to point out to me the missions that weren’t a-okay with the goddamn Nazis!” Clint jerked away from Fury to put his head in his hands.

Natasha held Fury’s eye steadily and deliberately did not say any of the things she was thinking. He could probably guess at them anyway. She wasn’t naive, she had known her work with SHIELD wasn’t all sunshine and puppies. She was a liar and a killer and a spy, and she had always been those things no matter what the organization. But she had believed that SHIELD was supposed to be about protecting people. Clint had told her that, when he brought her in. Fury had helped her believe that. But then, she had believed the Red Room’s lies too.

“We have all made compromises. I have made compromises. But the missions I’ve sent you two on were, to the best of my knowledge, in the spirit of SHIELD. To protect our people, to protect the world.”

“And Project Insight?” asked Natasha.

Fury winced. “Yeah. In retrospect, maybe Cap was right about that one.”

“You’re never getting Cap back, you know that, right? I gave him the Winter Soldier file. It’s war for him now, for what they did to Barnes. SHIELD, HYDRA, it’s not gonna matter to him. Or to Barnes, I’d wager.” Natasha didn’t think about how she could guess what Barnes would think. 

Clint perked up from his contemplation of the kitchen table. “Wait, the Winter Soldier? He’s real?”

Natasha kicked him under the table. “Full debrief later.”

“You had to give him the file? It’s not gonna lead to anything but misery. The Winter Soldier isn’t going to come in from the cold because Rogers asks nicely, if the Soldier can even come in at all.”

“Rogers was going to try no matter what.” She ignored Fury’s if about Barnes. That was Steve’s problem. “So now what? You’re a dead man, officially speaking. Gonna be on clean up duty? Or are you rebuilding SHIELD?” Natasha was poking at Fury, sure, but she also genuinely wanted to know. 

Clint didn’t let Fury answer. “Yeah, I’m not on HYDRA clean up duty, and fuck SHIELD. I did not sign on to work for secret Nazis. That was not in the recruitment speech. Neither was getting possessed by an alien god. So y’know what? I fucking _retire,_ okay?” 

He was not joking. Clint’s face was tight with misery, and suddenly she could see the pain of the past couple of years etched deep in the lines on his face. Things had not been easy, between Loki and losing Coulson and all the fall out from the Battle of Manhattan. And Clint, Natasha realized with a pang, was getting older. _Are you_? asked an insidious voice in her mind. She swallowed against the sudden lump of panic in her throat.

Fury nodded, looking carefully at Clint. “You know you’re still an Avenger, if you want it.” 

“Sure,” Clint scoffed. “For what that’s worth.” Natasha hooked an ankle around his under the table, and caught his gaze, a silent support, and some of the misery on his face eased. Clint would be okay, she thought, given some time.

“Well I for one _am_ on HYDRA clean up duty,” said Fury as he turned to Natasha. “I’d like you with me, if you’re willing.” 

“Are you sure you trust me?” It still stung that she hadn’t been on the need-to-know list of people who were in on Fury’s fake death. It was bratty of her to not let it go, probably, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

The barb didn’t elicit the exasperated eye roll or “get the fuck over it” glare she had expected. Nick’s mouth just settled in a sad line for the briefest of moments before he gave her a thin smile. “Yeah, Natasha. I trust you.”

It felt a bit too little, too late. But what the hell, she might as well join Fury. “Okay. I’m in.”

Fury just nodded in acceptance, and then it was all debriefing and logistics. Retired or not, Clint still needed to know the lay of the post-SHIELD land, and getting by without SHIELD resources to rely on took careful planning. It was hours later by the time they’d gone over everything, and they were about to decamp for the safe house’s bedrooms when Fury returned to the subject of just what Steve was up to. 

“You really just gave Rogers the Winter Soldier file and left him to have at that wild goose chase? The Soldier damn near killed him.”

“Wilson is with him. And I don't think Barnes is an immediate danger to Rogers. Barnes was the one who pulled him out of the Potomac.” Steve had been certain of that. Natasha had been ready to put it down to wishful thinking and hypoxia, but the physical evidence at the riverbank backed Steve up, plus the testimony of the medic who Barnes had apparently directed to Steve’s location.

Fury considered her closely for a moment. “You keep calling him that.”

“What?”

“The Winter Soldier. Barnes. You know something I don’t?”

The question knocked her off balance. She couldn’t say why she called him Barnes instead of his code name, but she knew what Fury was getting at. It was probably more accurate to call him the Winter Soldier. James Buchanan Barnes had died in 1944, and whoever was walking around in his body now might well have nothing to do with who Barnes had been. Natasha wasn’t willing to concede that though, for reasons she couldn’t bring herself to examine too closely. 

“You haven’t been on the receiving end of the _look_ Rogers gives you when you call Barnes that. God, it’s worse than kicking a puppy.” _Good save_ , she told herself. It wasn’t even untrue.

“Ah man, Cap’s sad kicked puppy look. You could weaponize that, it’s that fucking potent,” chimed in Clint.

Fury seemed content to let it go at that, for now. Natasha wished she could let it go too. 

* * *

 

Natasha had washed up and was getting ready to catch a few hours of sleep in one of the safe house’s musty bedrooms when she heard Clint’s knock at the door. Now was the time for unofficial debrief: if Clint hadn’t come to her room, she’d have gone to his. She opened the door, and he slipped in to sit on the bed. She took a seat on the other side of the bed and met his steady gaze. 

“So, you dumped just about all of SHIELD’s files online, huh.”

“Yeah. Steve made a pretty convincing case for it. Sorry everyone knows about your trashy carnie childhood now.” 

Clint snorted and rolled his eyes. “You know I don’t care about that. I meant—your file. That’s out there too?”

“My file too. The children’s ward and all. Pierce thought I’d back down if he reminded me of it.”

“Fuck him, he was apparently a raging Nazi, what does he know.” Clint paused. “Is _all_ of your file out there?”

Ah, so that’s what Clint was getting at. Trust him to be so concerned. Even years after her rough first months at SHIELD, Clint still occasionally felt like he had to be her advocate. It was part of the debt she owed him, that he had been so thoroughly on her side when he had had precious little reason to be. When she had thrown every reason he shouldn’t be in his face. 

“You mean my actual birthday? No. Not even creepy computer Zola knew that. Fury and Carter always kept that entirely off the record.” 

She had checked. There were three people at SHIELD, other than Natasha herself, who knew the full story of Natalia Alianovna Romanova, or what passed for it: Peggy Carter, Nick Fury, and Clint Barton. She had Peggy Carter to thank for that. Carter had been retired when Natasha defected to SHIELD, but she maintained an interest in the Black Widow program, and Fury had brought her in to assess Natasha. To Natasha’s dismay, Carter had recognized her from a mission in the 70s, and there went her “I’m just a twenty-something spy escaping the smoking remnants of the Red Room” cover. Natasha’s real age, and whatever Red Room experimenting was responsible for her slowed aging, remained a closely guarded secret. Natasha preferred it that way. Natasha had taken out a not insignificant part of the remnants of the Red Room in part to ensure it would stay that way. 

“Well, that’s something at least. Not all of your dirty laundry is up for grabs on the internet.” 

Natasha almost wished it was. At least then she would know about all of it. As it was, there were huge swathes of her own history that she didn’t know, lost to the Red Room’s brainwashing and mind wiping. She tried not to dwell on it much. She had remade herself, memories or no memories. 

“Yeah. So, retiree Clint Barton huh? Gonna get a condo in Florida, take up some hobbies? Or no, maybe you’re more the buy a Winnebago and RV across our great United States type.”

“This from the woman who’s older than me,” Clint said, giving her a playful shove. “I think….I think I’m gonna go back to Iowa for a bit.” 

“Is there even anything in Iowa? Isn’t it just….farms and cows?”

“Maybe I’ll get a farm and a cow then, I don’t know. I’ve just gotta take a break from this SHIELD shit, y’know? I’ll answer the call if Cap assembles the Avengers, but otherwise….”

“Old Man Barton has a farm—”

Clint groaned, but apparently couldn’t help himself from joining in on her “E-I-E-I-O,” and they both laughed. Clint would be alright, she thought. She’d have to be alright too.

* * *

 

_She is on a mission with the American. He had chosen her specifically, out of all of the other Black Widows, and the knowledge fills Natalia with a fierce pride. They have trained together, and she has held up better than the other girls against the American’s inhuman speed and strength. She even managed to take him down once, and had earned a quiet “Well done,” for it._

_The specifics of the mission are not clear in her mind, but that doesn’t feel important compared to how very present she feels, in this specific moment. The sun is blazing in an almost painfully blue sky, and she and the American are sitting on a park bench together. It is just cold enough that the coat and glove the American is wearing to cover his metal arm are unremarkable. Natalia fits neatly under his arm, and their heads are tipped close together, as if they are exchanging lovers’ confidences._

_They are not: instead, they are surveilling an enemy of Department X. If the man makes the dead drop they suspect he will, then he and whoever comes to pick it up will be dead in hours. As missions go, it is a simple one. Natalia is vaguely aware that half the purpose of the mission is to flex Department X’s muscles, to show the strength and ubiquity of the Black Widow program. If there are other political currents and tensions, she does not know about them, and the American does not divulge them. Details like when or where or who are only dim flashes, like glimpses of water down a long, deep well._

_Having temporarily exhausted her store of meaningless chatter, Natalia decides to ask the question that has so occupied the whole of the Widows’ dormitory. The walls have ears in the Red Room, almost literally, but they are in the open air now. Natalia is willing to take a risk._  

_“What’s your name? Your real name, I mean.” They both have cover names for the mission, but the American is known as only that and the Winter Soldier in the Red Room. He is singular, she thinks, unlike the over two dozen Black Widows, who have been allowed to keep their names if only for convenience’s sake. Maybe that’s why he does not need a name. Everyone knows who they mean, when they say the American or the Soldier, which makes it as good as a name, perhaps._

_The American huffs out a quick breath of either displeasure or amusement. “I don’t have one.”_

_Natalia peers up at his face from where her head rests on his shoulder. His expression is calm. She suspects him of lying, and is not pleased. She’s not a child, he could just say he can’t or won’t tell her._

_“Everyone has a name. Or had one once, at least.”_

_“If I ever had one, I don’t remember it.” Some of his calm recedes in favor of a faint pain in the lines around his eyes and an unhappy twist to his mouth._

_That is disquieting. Natalia knows a little of what the Red Room can do with memories. Was it punishment for the American? Malfunction? Whatever else she was vaguely conscious of the Red Room taking from her, she has always had her name. Natalia Alianovna Romanova, she recites to herself, as if to ward off a contagious amnesia._

_“Well you must have had one as a child at least. I don’t suppose it was Vanya?” Vanya is his cover name for the current mission. He shakes his head, a little amused now. “Are you actually American?” Natalia knows he is called that for his perfect American accent, and for other reasons lost to time or gossip._

_“I don’t know. You ask too many questions, little spider. Focus on the mission.”_

_He should have a proper name, Natalia thinks. Everyone should have a name._

Natasha woke up in her bed in the safe house with tears on her cheeks. She wiped them away roughly. Just an autonomic response, probably. It was still dark, and a fumble for her phone showed that she still had a couple of hours before wheels up. She probably wasn’t going to be able to fall back asleep. And maybe it was time to actually think about this whole Barnes thing.

She could ignore the other dreams as being the usual nonsensical crap her sleeping brain spewed. She had had stranger dreams in the course of her deprogramming, and the SHIELD therapists had assured her that was totally normal. And the things she seemingly just knew about Barnes, those she could pass off as being Red Room bullshit. Maybe there had been some mark who had looked like Barnes once, and the Red Room’s helpful implanted memories about him were making their unwelcome return.

But this dream felt like a memory, a real one. She examined the other memories she had of Barnes as the Winter Soldier, the ones she was absolutely sure were real: the time he shot her in Odessa, and the fight just weeks ago on the bridge. When he had shot her, she’d seen little more of him than a glimpse of the metal arm, which was enough to ID him as the Winter Soldier, boogeyman of assassins. But no one was supposed to survive the Winter Soldier, so she had fixated on finding out what had gone wrong with that mission and why he hadn’t killed her too. His shot had been terrifyingly accurate enough that she knew he could have. On the bridge, she’d successfully drawn his fire, and she’d ridden him like a particularly cranky and murderous mechanical bull while trying to garrote him. There had been no unexpected reprieves or flashes of familiarity then. 

But he’d still had the mask on, and the mask and goggles before then. Not even Steve had recognized him before the face mask had come off. And he certainly hadn’t seemed to recognize her. She worried at the memories, turning them over and over in her mind as if searching them for a seam or join that would crack them open and reveal either their truth or falsity, but there was nothing. They were just memories.

* * *

 

Natasha maybe should have thought a little harder about joining Fury given that HYDRA clean up duty was shaping up to be about 80% road tripping across Europe and 20% actually fucking HYDRA’s shit up. That was a lot of awkward silence to endure once they had run out of mission-related things to talk about. She knew Steve and Sam were also road tripping, but they were probably having earnest heart to hearts and bonding. Or maybe Sam was just taking the opportunity to forcibly introduce Steve to more modern music. Either way, it was probably more fun than this strained silence.

She took a break from tracking Interpol’s HYDRA-related chatter to text Sam: _make steve listen to 90s boybands and send me a picture of the look on his face_. The response came a few minutes later: _well hello to you too, natasha. Why yes, I am doing fine and have not yet been murdered by the winter soldier, thank you for asking!_ Another few minutes or so of silence, and then a small torrent of texts arrived. Sam had probably pulled over or stepped away from Steve. _90s boybands are not happening, steve and I are very into motown right now_. And then after a few updates on their location and the status of the hunt for Barnes, _that file fucked steve up, natasha. it fucked me up and I’m not barnes’ bff_. It wasn’t like Natasha hadn’t known that would happen.

 _I know. But he asked for the file_ , she texted back. _He won’t talk about it. He hasn’t said a goddamn word in 150 miles, other than to ask for a bathroom break_ , Sam responded. Okay, maybe that was a no on the earnest heart to hearts. _Yeah, steve doesn’t really talk about that kind of thing_. Wary, private Steve who’d joke about how everyone in his barbershop quartet was dead, but who’d never say if he was lonely or sad or grieving. Another minute of silence from Sam, and then, _ok, back on the road._ _Don’t be a stranger and stay safe, nat_. She sent back a _you too_ and contemplated texting Steve. But what could she say? All she could think to say was “sorry,” and she didn’t even know what for.

Natasha checked in with a few other people for status updates, and by the time she was done, they were nearly at the first suspected HYDRA base they were planning to hit and from there things were easy. From there it was the comforting and known routine of violence and intelligence gathering, and if she wasn’t quite on autopilot, she still managed to retreat behind the well-worn armor that was being a Black Widow.

While she torched the gutted remnants of a HYDRA lab, she thought of Tony Stark, who put on and discarded his armor at will, who could blithely say “I am Iron Man,” with the same easy conviction as “Hi, I’m Tony Stark.” She thought of Clint, who wore the name Hawkeye easily, a little rueful about its origins but settled in it nonetheless, and who could see a self beyond Agent Barton. She thought of Steve, who shouldered Captain America and the shield as a duty. Meanwhile, she was fractured pieces: Black Widow, Agent Romanoff, Nat, Natasha, Natalia, Natalie Rushman, and dozens more pieces and covers aside, and who knew how many shards of her lost to the Red Room, unrecoverable. She wondered if she could scrape them together into a convincing whole. She wondered if Barnes had a piece of her.

The thoughts ran in the back of her head as the days and raids stretched on. She knew Nick was noticing and worrying, because the unhappy lines around his mouth were etched deep, but she wasn’t about to share what amounted to her midlife crisis with him. And she sure as hell wasn’t about to share whatever this business with Barnes was about, not when she still had no idea what was going on. The work was more important anyway, and left her little time for anything else.

Her hand was forced eventually, of course. It was almost three weeks into the road trip, and their time was split fairly equally between destroying HYDRA strongholds and bailing out compromised SHIELD agents. Fury was rebuilding a network of trusted agents, in preparation for whatever the wreckage of SHIELD would become in this brave new world.

Natasha didn’t doubt the necessity of it, but she had rather come around to Steve’s view of things after seeing just how deep the poison of HYDRA ran. She told Fury as much when she understood what Fury was up to as they drove to put out the latest SHIELD-related fire in Austria.

“Rogers was right, we needed to burn it all down. But something’s gotta fill the vacuum, and I’m gonna try my damnedest to make sure we start over the right way.” He took his eye off the road to glance at Natasha, and said, “And the Avengers at least are separate from SHIELD. Whatever reservations you have about me, or about a new SHIELD, I hope you still consider yourself part of the Avengers Initiative.”

It was no less than what he’d told Clint. And it was a lifeline he was offering, she knew. Something to cling to that was more or less an unalloyed good, because the Avengers were a ragtag band of dangerous and broken fuckups (and Thor), but they had saved New York, and the world. However much red she had in her ledger, some that she didn’t even know about, that at least was indisputably in the black.

She hmmed noncommittally in response and said, “I’m going to try to catch some sleep. Wake me when we’re an hour out.”

It took longer than usual to drop into sleep, as it usually did these days. She hadn’t planned to sleep too deeply, but when Fury woke her up, sleep and dreams clung to her for a few confusing minutes. She had dreamed—she chased the wisps of it, but no, it was already gone. 

Fury was saying something. “Natasha. _Natasha_.” How long had he been trying to wake her? The car was stopped and he was looking at her with some concern. She noted distantly that he didn’t reach out to touch her. That was smart of him.

“Yes. I’m up.” Fury eyed her with skepticism, but she was fine, and their prep for the mission went smoothly. She could do the routine on autopilot, she could do it while bleeding out: check the intel, run down the plan, arm and armor herself.

The mission was sort of grim, as missions went, but it was a necessary part of the post-HYDRA cleanup, and it was at least a little bit her mess to clean up. After she leaked the files, every SHIELD base and outpost and office and safe house turned into a war zone, and while plenty of them did just fine either because HYDRA hadn’t fully infiltrated them or because the non-evil SHIELD personnel won the fight, there were some that didn’t make it. And of those that didn’t make it, there were more than a few off-books SHIELD bases that had resources that needed to be either destroyed or secured for the remnants of SHIELD rather than leaving them to HYDRA or assorted other intelligence agencies. The base in Austria was one of them.

Whatever it had been before, it was a mausoleum now. It was tucked away in a complex of business offices, a normal seeming medical office from the outside, the discreet kind that suggested if you didn’t know what the offices were for, you weren’t rich enough to afford them. On the inside, it was a smallish complex that extended a couple floors underground. Everyone in it was dead. 

The base’s emergency beacon had been signaling out into the void since shortly after the Triskelion fell. The SHIELD agent who had originally responded found everyone inside dead, the loyal to SHIELD personnel and the HYDRA agents having apparently managed mutually assured destruction, and without the resources or time to blow the place, the agent had simply passed along the intel until it got to Fury. Fury wanted the place destroyed, given that it was the site of some research that Alexander Pierce had shown a little too much interest in.

They moved in under cover of darkness, checking the perimeter and the ground floor offices for any booby traps or unpleasant surprises. The ground floor was empty; no one had made it out of the lower levels. Fury’s authorization still worked to give them access, overriding the lockdown protocol, and Natasha took point as they exited the elevator. The smell of bodies decomposing hung heavy and noxious in the air. It was unpleasant, but nothing Natasha hadn’t handled before. The bodies themselves were just that: bodies. Variously dead of gunshot wounds and blunt force trauma, with marks of their last acts of desperate violence scattered all around the once neat and sterile base.

Once Natasha and Fury finished clearing both floors, they split up: Natasha to check the computers for any breaches or data that should be pulled, and Fury to start setting up the “gas explosion” that would destroy the base. When she got to the base’s computer terminal, she had to move the body of an agent who was slumped over the keyboard and controls. Natasha eased the body back into the chair, breathing through her mouth to avoid the worst of the smell, and was about to turn back to the terminal when she caught sight of the agent’s face.

She had been young. Younger than Natasha credited SHIELD with usually recruiting, and wearing a lab coat. Natasha checked the ID badge clipped to the lab coat: LEVEL 2, ACADEMY TRAINEE. Natasha recalled that the SHIELD Academy trainees, kids straight out of college or even high school, did get sent to various bases and outposts for what amounted to internships. The Academy itself—Natasha had been there, had given some training seminars there, and she thought she recognized this girl’s face. The Academy hadn’t been like the Red Room, not at all, but there was something—The dream or memory she had chased earlier, or something like it, came back to ambush her now.

* * *

 

_The Black Widows are standing at attention in the training room. Or are they in the studio, lined up along the barre with chins lifted and feet in the fourth position? The memory flickers and hisses, full of static like an analog TV with poor signal. No, they are in the Red Room, in the training room. Madame is there and she is telling them that they are to be granted a very important opportunity, if they are willing to fight for it. Natalia wonders how that makes it different than anything else. The Black Widows must be willing to fight for everything: for food, for sleep, for missions, for scraps of knowledge. One of the trainers likes to mutter that these new Black Widows have it easy. Natalia cannot conceive of how._

_Madame tells them that the most skilled among them (there are 28 young ballerinas with the Bolshoi—no, that’s not right—there are 28 Black Widow agents—) will train with the American, the Winter Soldier, and a shiver of fear and anticipation runs along the line of Black Widows. The Winter Soldier is a story they tell in the dormitories at night, a story cobbled together from half-heard discussions among the trainers and doctors and tall tales from the guards that trickle down to the girls of the Red Room. Defective Black Widows are sent to the Soldier for correction or termination, or Black Widows are sent to the Winter Soldier to be taught how to perform sexually with a mark, or the Winter Soldier is half machine and will turn the Black Widows into machines as well, or the Winter Soldier was Russia’s perfect super soldier from the war, now irreparably damaged, or the Winter Soldier is actually an American who defected for love of Russia…. Natalia knows it’s almost all gossip, of dubious value, but it is intelligence nonetheless._

_In her peripheral vision, she can see the Winter Soldier as he’s brought in, flanked by guards. Natalia calculates whether the risk of an open appraisal is worth it or not: it’s even odds whether Madame will consider it disobedient impertinence or vigilance worthy of praise. Her curiosity wins out, and she shifts her gaze from the neutral middle distance straight ahead of her to look directly at the Soldier. He is a tall, powerfully built man, and he moves like a predator. He is not armed, but she sees the glint of metal in his left hand—no, the metal is his left hand. Perhaps the half machine rumor is true. His face is handsome, if in a sullen sort of way. Natalia thinks he is perhaps the most handsome man she has ever seen, outside of the training videos with American movie stars that are meant to teach them how to behave like convincing Americans._

_He is moving down the line of Black Widows slowly, appraising them. Natalia can hear some of the girls’ breath quicken. Beside her, Irina is struck with a fine tremor. Irina had been a little too wide-eyed when it came to the stories about the Winter Soldier terminating defective Black Widows. Further down the line, Katja lets out a barely audible squeak of a whimper. She will be punished for that. When the Soldier reaches her, Natalia meets his eyes squarely, and finds herself a little shocked by how incongruously pretty they are. He has thick, dark lashes, and his eyes are a chilly but bright gray-blue. She cannot read the expression in them, though she thinks there is maybe something despairing there, behind the chill. He stops in front of her._

_“Not afraid, little spider?” His voice is hoarse, almost painfully so. She sees the guards shift uncomfortably behind him, hands tightening on their weapons, but Natalia does not flinch._

_“No.” And as she says it, she finds that it’s true. She is not afraid of him, though she cannot say why. It’s only because she’s looking so closely that she sees it: the barest twitch of his mouth into a smile, the smallest creasing of bitter mirth around his eyes._

_He continues down the line as if the exchange never happened, but in training later, he picks her to spar with first._

* * *

 

Natasha jerked out of the flashback and stumbled against the computer terminal behind her, eyes snapping to where Fury was standing a wary few feet away. She couldn’t talk herself out of this one. She could talk herself out of it with Fury, sure, say it was just a spot of PTSD, no worries, she was fine. But she knew. This wasn’t a hodgepodge of constructed and implanted memories, the kind a SHIELD deprogrammer had once patiently helped her sort through when she joined SHIELD. This wasn’t a weird dream that she could shake off as irrelevant. This was from her lost years.

“I’m fine, it’s fine.” She took a deep breath and steadied herself, and turned back to the terminal to do her work. “Are you going to blow up the base or not?”

“Natasha—”

She clenched her fists on the keyboard, but didn’t turn around. “I will tell you what just happened, but right now we have work to do.”

“Twenty minutes, and then we’re out.” She heard him leave, and got to work on the terminal. In twenty minutes, they were out of the base. In forty, they were miles away when the building blew in what would look like an unfortunate explosion caused by a gas leak.

“You want to explain yourself now? Because it looked to me like you were having some kind of episode that was jeopardizing your and my safety on the mission.”

“I just—remembered something, that’s all.”

“What, that you left your stove on? Forgot to return a Netflix DVD? I’m gonna need you to be more specific.”

“From the Red Room.”

“That been happening often?”

“It’s just been little things mostly, some dreams.”

Fury glanced at her briefly before returning his gaze to the road. “A couple of months ago, I’d have pulled you off active duty and told you to take it to one of SHIELD’s shrinks.”

“And now?”

“We both know that’s not an option now. So talk to me.”

Natasha did not especially want to talk to Fury about this. She wouldn’t have wanted to talk to a shrink either, but it was easier to bullshit them. “It’s not relevant to the mission.”

“It’s relevant to your mission readiness,” countered Fury.

“There’s not much to say. I’m remembering some things.” She chewed on her lip for a moment and debated leaving it at that. She had a few confusing memories of Barnes that might or might not amount to anything, and either way, anyone who could tell her the truth about them was probably either dead or equally fucked in the head. If she told Fury, he would push for answers. Natasha wasn’t sure she wanted them. The memory of the Winter Soldier’s words to her flared bright in her mind for a moment: _not afraid, little spider_? 

“I don’t think Odessa was my first run in with the Winter Soldier.”

Fury drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, considering, and nodded. “Okay, that’s not a surprise. You were both active in some of the same areas over a long period of time. Seeing him again could trigger some memories.” He paused, frowning. “Except you said it was from the Red Room.”

“Yeah. I think he trained us for a while.” Which of course did not explain the other things she knew about Barnes, like the sound of his laugh, or the exact look on his face when he—

“Red Room must have had HYDRA ties. Director Carter always thought so, but we figured it was equal parts picking up where HYDRA left off and convergent evolution. And we know the Winter Soldier was with the Russians for a while. Feel free to dig into it, but any analysis on that is low priority at this point.”

Natasha nodded and rested her head against the car window. “Guess I’ve always kind of been HYDRA, huh.” 

“That’s not on you.”

“Because I was just following orders?” Natasha had never been willing to hide behind that poisonous justification.

“No, because you didn’t know. This business with SHIELD and HYDRA, that’s on me, and it’s on Pierce. You trusted SHIELD, and apparently we weren’t worthy of that trust. I’m sorry.”

She studied Fury’s face, still intent on the road, at the lines that had grown deeper in just a few short months. He didn’t show it too much beyond that, but Fury was taking SHIELD’s collapse hard. But then, he should be taking it hard. She wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t.

“Thanks,” she said, and it felt inadequate. She didn’t know what else to say. She had trusted him, he hadn’t entirely trusted her, and that was just the way the job went. Like she had told Steve, this wasn’t the business for making friends. More miles passed by in silence, and the sky began to lighten with the first hints of dawn.

“Is it gonna be a problem, if Rogers brings the Winter Soldier in?” asked Fury.

“Will it be a problem for you? He nearly killed you.”

He gave her a briefly exasperated look, which she deserved for the amateur deflection, and said, “I got a look at his file too. I don’t have high hopes, but if he shows up mostly sane and not murdering people left and right, I won’t hold it against him. Plus, it was a _damn_ good shot. You know he didn’t even have visual on me?”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “Are you really gonna sit here and fanboy over the Winter Soldier?”

“Are you really gonna act like you can distract me from my question? Is he going to be a problem for you? I know they weren’t kind in the Red Room.”

“He was.” It slipped out before Natasha could catch herself, and the memories attached to the certainty were vague and incoherent, more emotion than event. And suddenly, she wanted them. She wanted the memories back. She had remade herself without them, thinking that there was nothing good in her blank spaces, not really, but now she knew there was, and she wanted it back, every last bit of it. The desire welled up in her, desperate and wild, and she clenched her fists against the strength of it.

She glanced at Fury, and saw that she had surprised him, his eye flicking back and forth between her and the road. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah.”

* * *

 

After her heart to heart with Fury, the memories started coming thick and fast, at the slightest provocation, as if given long-denied permission.They were in a lull between raids on HYDRA bases, and Natasha would have rejected the break as coddling and pushed to continue, but then Fury jetted off to take care of some SHIELD business that required his personal touch, and told Natasha to hole up in yet another old SHIELD safe house to work on coordinating anti-HYDRA efforts with the assorted burned SHIELD operatives who were still in the wind. Which, fair enough: Maria was fairly swamped with her end of things at Stark Industries offering haven to former SHIELD employees, and Natasha’s help was sorely needed.

And if it meant that there was no one around to witness her increasingly frequent trips down memory lane, well, that was for the best, because sometimes all it took was Natasha losing focus for a minute and then—

_Training for the Black Widows is endless. Physical training, mental training, mission-specific training, and some training that Natalia suspects is sheer busywork meant to keep the Widows from ever having enough time to consider leaving the Red Room. By the time Natalia trains with the American, she has been on dozens of successful missions, and it’s the same for the other Black Widows. They all feel very old and sophisticated, though the oldest of them is only 20 and Natalia herself is 19, and they are restless for the opportunity for more long-term missions under deeper cover. The presence of the American bodes well: perhaps they are being prepared to be sent to America._

_As they spend more time with him, the other girls shift to calling him the American more than the Winter Soldier. The Winter Soldier is too powerful a name, tied as it is to all those scary stories told in the dark. No Red Room girl will easily concede the power of fear, so he becomes the American, and the whispers in the dark dormitory turn to discussion of his looks and that metal arm._

_Natalia studies him closely in their first few training sessions, the ones that will determine who will train with him further. He is always accompanied by guards, which is interesting. Though there are guards scattered throughout the Red Room, the Black Widows are not constantly accompanied by them the way the American is. It can’t be for his safety from them, so it’s either to keep the Widows safe, or because he’s a flight risk. And though the Widows are a valuable resource of the Red Room, she doesn’t think it’s to keep them safe from him. As a trainer, he is not cruel. He takes no pleasure in any betrayals of weakness or fear, and doesn’t respond to Ksenia and Yelena’s calculated goads. He speaks the bare minimum, and does not call Natalia little spider again._

_But when he looks at them, when he looks at her, he sees them. Natalia has studied the other men and women of the Red Room closely, and she knows that the trainers and Madame and the doctors look at the Widows the same way they look at weapons in the armory. They are tools to be used in the service of Department X and Russia. The American’s regard is different. That is enough to make some of the girls flinch and for their gazes to skitter away, or for them to quietly absent themselves from behind their eyes. They aren’t used to being really seen. Natalia isn’t either, but meeting the American’s eyes makes her want to be seen, makes her want to see him._

_So she does as Madame said: she fights for the opportunity to train with the American. And because she is the best of the Black Widows, she wins._

* * *

 

Natasha mulled over the new memory. It both did and didn’t fit with the memories she already had. Her memories of training in the Red Room had always felt unmoored in time, a hodgepodge of constructed and implanted memories with only the skills she undoubtedly had serving as proof that at least some of them were real. She had been okay with that, for the most part. A childhood and young adulthood in the Red Room weren’t exactly the stuff of fond nostalgia. Natasha shook herself free of the memory and got back to work, but then later in the day, more memories came into sharp focus, in a series of rapid fire flashes seemingly in response to the scope of the rifle she was cleaning:

_It’s just her and the American, and they are lying on an outcropping of rock in the forest. Natalia is looking through a rifle scope at a deer. It’s snowing, and her breath makes clouds in the air, but the American is warm as a furnace beside her, his voice pitched low and quiet in her ear. He’s telling her how to best take the shot and then his metal hand is on her hip to gently reorient her position—_

_And a bullet tears through her side, and she was covering her engineer but it’s gone clear through her into him and he’s bleeding out and fuck fuck fuck, who could have made that shot, there’s no one at any of the possible vantage points but then she sees it, the glint of metal—_

_“There’s no way you can make this shot, it’s not possible,” she insists. Her preference for this mission had been a swift garroting after the target left his mistress’s apartment, but her partner had insisted that a kill shot would be preferable. The conditions are far from favorable for it, from bad weather to poor sight lines, and if he misses, the failed attempt will compromise the whole mission._

_He flicks his eyes towards her, one eyebrow raised, and smirks. He is perfectly still otherwise. She sees the barest lift of his shoulders that means he’s inhaling, so she returns her attention to the target through her binoculars, and then on the exhale, he pulls the trigger. It’s a perfect shot, straight through the target’s heart. Natalia watches him crumple, the people around him moving in confusion and alarm. The American is already in motion, disassembling the rifle, and within minutes they are just another couple walking through the city, arm in arm._

* * *

 

That night Natasha’s sleep was troubled, practically every feverish dream dumping her back in the Red Room. If she had any hope of having some control over this process, she was rapidly losing it. So the next night, she resolved to exhaust herself enough to avoid the frantic racing of her mind. She ran and worked out and trained and found that even with her mind silent, the body remembered. When Natasha ran through fighting forms and practiced punch after punch and kick after kick, she was fighting against ghosts: the ghosts of her fellow Black Widows, of past targets, of Red Room trainers. Of the Winter Soldier. If she let herself slip into that mindless, empty space of pure physical exertion, she could almost grasp the memories—

_After weeks of evaluation and training without incident, the American is finally left alone with the small handful of Black Widows who have been deemed fit to train with him. If Natalia had thought him a formidable opponent before, she had not been prepared for his unchecked strength and speed now. The Black Widows are well aware of their weaknesses, relative to larger men; they are taught to exploit them and make the best of them, but with the American, it is an order of magnitude different. Yelena and Inna quail at the discrepancy and at his superior strength, dissolving into unseemly tantrums that do not puncture the American’s calm, but that do get them kicked out of training._

_Natalia does not quail, and Natalia does not fear. There is something in the American’s steady gaze that assures her, some certainty that he is not like the other trainers who variously treat the Black Widows like deadly dolls or dangerous children. So Natalia bears the bruises without complaint and doesn’t let herself get frustrated. He speaks little, teaching instead with his body, making adjustments to her form and running through positions and combinations until she is flawless. She can’t hope to match him strength for strength, so she learns to find other openings. She leverages every bit of her speed and agility, fights as dirty as she dares. Once, she even manages a direct, hard hit to his balls and she freezes in horror imagining the retribution that is likely to befall her. All the Black Widows have tried it at one time or another with the male trainers, and the trainers always retaliate viciously. Madame always makes a moue of distaste at it and tells the girls that yes, it is effective, but to please be more creative, the men took it so poorly._

_But when the American rises up from his pained crouch, there is no fury in his face. He lets out a rusty sound and she braces herself for the blow but—he’s laughing. Natalia stares in shock, arrested by the entirely unfamiliar sight._

_“Vicious, aren’t you? That was well done. If any opponent leaves you the opening, you should take it, dirty trick or no. Here, let me show you a few others….”_

_The days pass in a blur of relentless training, and more and more, when they spar, it is a dance._

* * *

 

Well so much for exhausting herself into a quiet mind thought Natasha as she settled her aching body on the safe house’s ratty but comfortable couch. TV was the opiate of the masses, right? The safe house’s TV was an old CRT, the buzz of the screen disconcertingly loud after so many years of LCD screens. But it still got a signal, so she curled up on the couch and channel surfed past news programs and shitty dubbed versions of American sitcoms and weird reality shows until she settled on a black and white movie, but that was a bad idea because—

_All of the Black Widows know English, and their American accents are meant to be flawless. They learned from the training videos as young children: the cartoons with bright colors, the Hollywood films with dashing actors and beautiful actresses. The Black Widows learned American manners, American music, American popular culture. They had to be able to disappear, to wipe out any trace of Russia that could betray their secret._

_A few weeks into training with the American, he is ordered to only speak English with the Black Widows. As soon as he does, Natalia realizes that it must be his native tongue. There is an ease in his voice when he speaks it, a loosening that speaks of familiarity and comfort. Strange and colorful idioms flow easily from his mouth as he teaches her how to arm a car bomb: “easy as pie,” and “now you’re cooking with gas,” and “up shit creek without a paddle.”_

_She huffs in annoyance after the fifth one and says, “These sayings are ridiculous. They can’t be real. Why is pie easy? Where did you even learn these?”_

_The American stills, a total absence of movement that has Natalia holding her breath. “I don’t know.”_

_It is not unusual for the Black Widows to have knowledge and memories they can’t trace. Natalia herself sometimes thinks she was a ballerina once—_

_“Well that does not inspire confidence, sir,” says Natalia, affecting a haughty tone she copies from one of the films the Black Widows had been shown._

_The American lets out a nearly silent laugh. “Take it easy there, Katharine Hepburn. Now here, you want to make sure you put this back exactly right, or the car won’t start—”_

She came out of that one laughing. _There you are Sergeant Barnes_ , she thought. That last bit had been pure Brooklyn. Even in the Red Room, he had still been in there, somewhere. She understood the source of Steve’s desperate hope that there was something left of James Barnes to salvage in the Winter Soldier better now. Natasha turned her attention back to the TV, now on a commercial. Maybe her brain was done for the night, maybe she could sleep. She wanted the memories of the Winter Soldier, of Barnes, sure. The trouble was that she didn’t get to pick and choose, and she didn’t want another night of the Red Room horror show. She let the sound of the TV and her own exhaustion lull her into mindlessness, and eventually she fell asleep on the couch.

* * *

 

When Natasha woke up, it was with a crick in her neck, a cramp in her thigh from where her leg had twisted oddly between the couch cushions, and an already fading sense of dream-induced urgency. Also, she was pointing a gun at Fury, who took it in stride, waggling the cup of coffee and pastry bag in his raised hands. Natasha shoved the gun back under the couch and got up to stretch.

“So you’ve had a fun couple of days, I see.” He set her breakfast on the coffee table, and took a seat on the far end of the couch. 

“Yeah, flashbacks are _super_ fun.”

Fury snorted and dropped it for the moment, opting for official business instead. They had the requisite status updates and logistics issues to get through, plus planning their next steps against HYDRA. Fury got her up to date while she drank her coffee and ate her overly sugary breakfast pastry, and then she gave Fury her own updates while he went to putter around the safe house’s tiny kitchen to make more coffee. It was little different than any number of meetings in various SHIELD conference rooms or situation rooms, the routine of it familiar and soothing. 

They were on their third cups of coffee when Fury prompted, “So. Flashbacks?” Ah, so they had moved on to the Nick-and-Natasha portion of the meeting, as opposed to the Director Fury and Agent Romanoff part.

“Of the Red Room. Of training with Barnes there.”

Nick leaned back in his corner of the couch, and his regard was frank and concerned. “Barnes. Not the Winter Soldier.” There wasn’t a question in his voice, but Natasha knew what he was asking.

“He was the Winter Soldier. We called him the American. But James Barnes was in there too.”

“Listen, there are some HYDRA techs who are starting to sing like goddamn canaries, they’re that eager to roll over on HYDRA higher ups for the hope of not getting shot for treason. It’s still mostly behind closed doors. But what they’ve been saying about the Winter Soldier program….”

“Do they know who the Winter Soldier really is?”

“No, seems like that information was reserved for HYDRA bigwigs only. It’s not in the leaked files either. But one of the senators involved in the hearings has a bug up her ass about the Winter Soldier, and she is _digging_. What the techs and scientists have been saying, plus the file you dug up...it’s some appalling shit, and Senator Kramer is going hard on human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, and she’s getting a lot of support for it. And that’s fine, it’s good for us, but the point is….what she’s digging up, it doesn’t look good for the chances of Barnes’ recovery.” Nick’s voice was gentle now, the kind of gentle that very few people ever heard from him. Natasha idly wondered if he would ever say this to Steve, if Steve would even listen if he did.

“Explain.”

“This isn’t like Barton being controlled by Loki. This isn’t like you breaking free of the Red Room. I have every fucking sympathy for what Barnes has been through, man’s the longest held prisoner of war in history, I get that. I’m just—”

“Not sure there’s enough of a person left to save?” interrupted Natasha, voice mild.

“Yeah.”  

Natasha’s reply was almost automatic. “Steve doesn’t think that.” She paused and considered for a moment. “And from what I’m remembering...he wasn’t a blank slate. The Red Room didn’t want blank slates, mindless weapons. They wanted skilled operatives who could think for themselves.” 

The Red Room had learned through painful trial and error that too much wiping, too much conditioning, led to psychotic operatives who snapped easily and didn’t function well in the field for long. The rumors of what happened to defective Black Widows had still been strong when Natasha was trained. They would have applied that reasoning to the Winter Soldier once he had proven himself to be stable enough for long enough, and they had done so judging by her memories. HYDRA, on the other hand….

Natasha shook her head and continued, “They treated him more or less the same way they treated the rest of the Widows, as far as I can tell. More security though, I think. He was always under guard in my earlier memories, but then they let us train together, sent us out together. I don’t know what Bucky Barnes was like, but the man who trained me, he had a personality, he was a person.”

Nick nodded slowly. “Okay. I’ll keep following Rogers’ lead on this then. But Natasha…”

“I know. I’m not naive, Nick.” Hope had a steep price, she knew, and she wasn’t sure she could afford to pay it when it came to Barnes, especially when she didn’t even entirely know what she was hoping for. She needed more concrete memories, not this tangle of feelings and certainties that might as well have come from nowhere.

“Okay,” Nick repeated, and then it was back to business, and time to move on to the next safe house, and the next mission.

* * *

 

She got a few days respite from her own memories after that, which was good, because they were gearing up to hit a series of HYDRA bases with the intel Fury came back with. And it was good, the work was good: the objectives were clear, the moralities free of shadows. This was simple work, when it came to her ledger. HYDRA operatives and bases were easy figures to debit and credit, turning red to black. But when she let her thoughts drift from the mission, she felt like she was on the precipice of something, like all her scattered lost memories were silently gathering their own momentum in the jagged and burned parts of her mind. Every night, it felt like she was on the long, upward climb of a roller coaster, waiting for the breathless and hysterical terror of the coaster’s highest peak, for the stomach-churning drop.

When the drop came, it both was and wasn’t a surprise.

_Natalia is in the armory when she’s abruptly seized by Department X security, and she knows immediately that the Red Room has found out about her and James. They move her through the halls roughly and she cooperates, because maybe this is nothing, maybe they don’t know about their plans to escape. She makes a few token protests anyway over the bird-fast pounding of her heart, and then she hears them. Dr. Aleksandr Lukin and a couple of the other scientists or technicians. Nothing good happens to the Black Widows who go to Lukin or his people._

_“They warned us he became too unstable after too long without a wipe.”_

_“Zola was a fucking hack, we shouldn’t have to make the man a vegetable after every—”_

_“Just put him back in cryo, Zola’s techs can deal with it. I don’t give a damn if he’s fucking every Black Widow in the Red Room, but that was unacceptable—”_

_Natalia is sick with terror now, shaking with it, as she’s forcefully dragged along by guards behind Lukin and his men through the hall towards the calibration room. They have James already and she thought they had been careful, they had been so careful, but it hadn’t been enough and what are they going to do to—Lukin moves away and she is held fast by the guards, with more behind her filing into the room, all of them armed._

_James is shackled to a chair in the calibration room, head lolling in a restraint. Natalia dimly recognizes the chair, but the one they use for the Widows is different, calibration is different, and she thinks she knows what they meant by wiping now—She should get a hold of herself, she should scope the room (always know your exits, always account for everyone in the room, says the American’s—no, James’, they both know his name now—voice in her head), so she does, tearing her eyes from James. There are too many people in the room for an escape, and James is incapacitated besides. There’s more equipment in the room than she thinks is usual. Something that looks like a cross between a water tank and a coffin, hooked up to some sort of power equipment or generator, and there are canisters of something connected to it too._

_Lukin makes adjustments to the equipment attached to the calibration chair, another technician beside him, and James is rousing now and straining against the bonds of the chair._

_“James!” she calls out before she can think better of it, and his head snaps towards her, the anguish on his face clear. Lukin strikes him hard before striding towards her to grasp her face roughly in his hand and turn her eyes from James to him._

_“This is your mess, Widow, and you are going to watch me clean it up, do you understand? There is no James, and there is no leaving Department X. There is only decommissioning.” Lukin has her practically by the throat now and holds her so that she has no choice but to look at James. Her pulse beats rapidly against Lukin’s hand, her breath almost wheezing._

_James has squeezed his eyes shut and she can see he’s saying something she strains to hear: “Barnes, Sergeant, 32557038, Barnes, Sergeant—” The technician forces a bite guard in his mouth, and turns again to the equipment. Natalia sees that James’ right hand is shaking where it’s clenched against the arm of the chair, and this is what finally makes tears spill from her eyes. The chair moves to a reclining position, and its machinery begins to hum and crackle, a sizzling sound like power lines filling the room, and then James is screaming and Natalia cannot hear anything else._

_It lasts for a long time. Natalia tries to discipline herself to stillness, tries to slow the frantic panting of her breath, because there’s nothing left to do for James, now, but try to save herself. She doesn’t think they will kill her, but she doesn’t know what her punishment will be. Besides this, that is, she thinks with a burst of despairing humor. James would have shared a grim smile with her at that, she knows._

_The chair finally powers down, and James is silent but for the sound of his labored breathing. Lukin finally lets her go, and goes over to James to look over the readings on the equipment. The chair returns to its upright position, and Natalia searches James’ face for—she doesn’t know what. His expression is blank. James, her Soldier, isn’t in there._

_“Soldier, what is your name?” asks Lukin._

_Confusion, then panic, flicker briefly across his face as James looks at Lukin. “I—I don’t—”_

_“Correct, you do not have one.” Lukin turns James’ head towards Natasha. There’s no recognition in his stare. And for the first time, when he looks at her, James doesn’t see her. Natalia feels it like a blow, and her knees go weak, but she refuses to let the men restraining her hold her up. She locks her knees and straightens her spine._

_“Who is she?” Ah, another blow, thinks Natalia, and takes a deep breath to prepare herself for the hit._

_“I don’t know. Is she the target?” She has to choke back a desperate, hysterical laugh now. The exquisite cruelty of it is impressive, and perhaps she’s about to learn the truth of the dark stories about what the Winter Soldier does to defective Black Widows firsthand._

_“No. Get him ready for the cryotank.” Lukin returns to her as the technician obeys, and inspects her doubtlessly tear-streaked face. “Don’t tell me you loved him. As if you girls are capable of such a thing.”_

_Natalia keeps her face still as her mind works frantically. What’s more likely to save her: that she was a stupid girl who fell in love with the Winter Soldier, or that she and the Winter Soldier had tried to engineer an escape? She’s a Black Widow, so of course she knows the answer._

_She lets her eyes fill with tears again, and her lips quiver. “But I am, I do. I love him.” Lukin snorts in disgust and slaps her._

_“Love is for children. I fucking told them, bring the Winter Soldier to work with a bunch of teenaged girls, what did they think was going to happen? Of course one of you would be stupid enough to fancy yourself in love with him. Well, see where that leads. Look.” He takes her face again and makes sure her eyes stay trained on James._

_The technician has finished with the water tank-looking thing by now and guards go to get James out of the chair and manhandle him over to the tank. He makes a small noise of distress and struggles against the guards but they retaliate with swift brutality, and before James can recover, he’s shoved into the tank and the door is closed. Natalia understands what’s happening now. The cryostasis unit activates, and she can still see James’ face in the tank’s small glass window. He’s still awake. Natalia wonders if this is how they do it every time, or if this is punishment. Frost is beginning to form on the glass of the window. He’s still awake._

_Natalia lets her tears fall. The best lies are the ones that have some truth._

_James’ eyes close soon enough, and Lukin releases her to go to his instruments and equipment. Her eyes stay fixed on James. Is he asleep? Does he feel the cold? She hopes not, he confessed to her once that the cold made the join between metal and flesh on his left arm ache—a strangled, broken sound escapes her throat. Lukin sighs, and gestures the guards still holding her towards the chair. She’s shackled to it as James was, and knows she’s out of options. He won’t kill her, probably. But maybe she won’t be Natalia Alianovna Romanova anymore either._

_“Consider this an opportunity, Natalia. I have been working on some…enhancements for the Black Widows. Much more subtle and useful than the likes of Erskine or Zola’s work. I have not had success just yet, but perhaps we will be lucky together, hmm?”_

_Then there is nothing but burning agony running through her veins for a very long time, and a storm in her head that takes and takes and takes. When she wakes in the infirmary, they tell her that she had been on a mission that had required extensive calibration. Some memory loss is to be expected. She finds this disquieting, but she knows she is Natalia Alianovna Romanova, and she is 20 years old, one of 28 Black Widows trained in Department X’s Red Room, and she doesn’t need to know anything else._

* * *

 

Natasha woke with tears on her face again, which was getting to be a depressingly frequent state of affairs. She lay in bed waiting for her heart rate to calm down, and it did eventually, but the tears wouldn’t stop. She got up and wiped at her eyes angrily, switched on the light, and rummaged through her pack for her own copy of the Winter Soldier file. It was 2 AM, but going back to sleep wasn’t an option.

She sat on the bed and went through the file methodically, looking for any hint of what she had just remembered. Because she knew it was a memory, a real one. There was of course no mention of her or any of the other Black Widows in the Winter Soldier file, she knew that, so she looked for any report signed off by Lukin. She found one, from just after James must have been transferred back to HYDRA. It was a terse couple of pages of mostly medical and scientific jargon, apparently in response to an annoyed memo from one of Zola’s scientists, because fucking Nazis and their evil bureaucracy. And there it was: _Recommend Subject not be removed from cryostasis for extended periods of time. Subject’s original personality and memories begin to reassert themselves and conflicts with programming cause considerable instability. If Subject is to be removed from cryostasis for more than six months, recommend intermittent wiping._ After that it was some veiled sniping about Zola’s skills or lack thereof, but with the context Natasha had now, she was fairly certain this report referred to James’ time in the Red Room. But why wasn’t there any mention of him training the Black Widows in the file?

She turned back to the file’s photos of James. She couldn’t quite think of him as a Bucky. It was a ridiculous nickname, and she had never known Steve’s Bucky. She had known the Winter Soldier, she had known James. The memory rose up clear in her mind: “I love him.” It hadn’t been a lie then. It maybe wasn’t a lie now.

She smoothed a finger over the photo of James in cryo, and lingered over the faint lines of pain in his face. He had been awake, when they put him in cryo. That wasn’t in the file. The way his right hand shook when he was in the chair wasn’t in the file. She flipped through the file again and again, through report after report and memo after memo, all of it a record of violence and brutality and inhumanity, and James was in none of it, not really. And now there was a ghost in the shape of the Winter Soldier haunting HYDRA and leading Steve and Sam on a merry chase, but Natasha gleaned nothing from that but the entirely reasonable actions of a burned operative. So where was James? Well, with Steve probably, in a way. Natasha grabbed her phone and called Steve before she could second-guess herself.

“Hello?”

“Are you alone?” Her voice sounded more husky and wrecked than she had anticipated.

“Natasha?”

“Who else?”

“I—Yeah, Sam’s out on a supply run. Are you okay? How are you doing?”

“I’m fine. Do you have time to talk?”

She heard some shuffling, and then he said, “Sure.”

“Sam told me you read the file.”

“Yeah, I read it. It was—thank you for getting it for me.” Steve’s voice was stiff and distant, and yeah, she knew what Sam meant by how the file fucked them up. It had fucked her up too, now. Her hand was still on the photo of James, fingers sketching small pointless circles on his brow, as if she could soothe the lines of pain away. A memory flickered briefly: she had done that once, for a sleeping James.

“The file doesn’t have everything. It was what my contacts could scrape together, but it doesn’t account for all of his missions or—”

“I know, I could tell as much. There are years missing, things blacked out.”

“I wanted to let you know that I’m working on filling in some of those holes. There might be something there that can help you find him now,” she said, though she hadn’t resolved to do that until this very moment. But then, she got the feeling now that if she was going to find her missing years, she needed to find James’ too.

“Thanks, that’s—thank you. You’ve done a lot already, Natasha, you can’t know how grateful I am.”

Silence stretched along the phone line, and Natasha thought she should have given more thought to how she was going to do this. “Can you tell me about him?”

“About Bucky? We haven’t had much luck on the search yet, as far as I can tell, he’s just been clearing out HYDRA bases—”

“That’s not what I meant. Can you tell me about him, who he was.”

Another pause. “Do you want to profile him?” 

It wasn’t an unfair question. Steve had been in briefings with her when she profiled a mark or a target, and he had a healthy respect for her skills. He got snappish and defensive when she turned those skills on him, which she tried not to do, or at least tried to make sure he didn’t notice her doing it. This was her chance to keep this strictly professional, a status update and an exchange of intel, and both of them going their separate ways after that. But she knew the kind of answer she would get from Steve if she did that. She would get a detailed assessment of James Barnes’ skills, and Steve would try to give her as many details as he could about his encounters with the Winter Soldier in as detached a tone as he could manage. 

“No, I want you to tell me about Bucky Barnes. He’s your best friend, but it’s been three years and all you’ve ever said about him is ‘even when I had nothing, I had Bucky.’ And this file, there’s nothing about _him_ in here, not really. I’d like to know.”

“The _file_ —that file is obscene, it’s evil. What they _did_ to him—” Steve broke off, sucking in a harsh breath, and Natasha stayed silent, the echo of James’ screams loud in her mind. “He’s not a _weapon_ , Natasha. He’s a person, and they didn’t care, they just—how do you erase a person?” His voice was hoarse and tight with misery and anger, and Natasha had to swallow past the lump of sympathetic pain in her own throat. Even erased, James had still been a person, at least to her. How much of that did they burn out of him later?

“I know. But he remembered you.”

“Yeah. I don’t know—He knew me, at least. Do you think his memories will come back?”

“I don’t know.” Hers were coming back. “Maybe. There are no guarantees.”

Steve sighed and said, “Sam’s been trying to get me to talk about Bucky too.” She could hear a faint rustling, like Steve was shifting around. It was inching towards dawn now, and Natasha was feeling the effects of her late night, or early morning, rather. She lay down on the bed with the phone pressed to her ear.

“And you haven’t taken him up on the offer, I’m guessing.”

“I talked to him some.”

“So talk to me too. Tell me about James—Bucky.”

“No one called him James.”

“Bucky is a ridiculous nickname for a grown man, I refuse to call him that.”

Steve snorted. “Peggy said the same. She insisted on calling him James too, but you know, the Commandos were about 40% Jameses by volume, so that got confusing real fast. They had a whole ‘who’s on first’ routine going with it. But he’s always been Bucky to me.” 

Steve paused, and then it all burst from him in a torrent, more words than she thought she’d ever heard Steve say at once about something that wasn’t work-related. “Sam says—You say I should talk about him, but I don’t know where to start. I’ve known him for as long as I can remember, we grew up together. He’s the best man I know. He was smart and kind and good with people, and I was just this angry little shit who was always sick and always starting fights and I don’t even know why he stuck with me. I don’t know what he saw in me. But he always—he could see me. He saw me, he _knew_ me. Not Captain America, not—not whatever history’s turned me into. And now history’s turned him into a museum exhibit.” 

Steve let out a strangled little laugh. “There’s books about him, and this fucking file, but I’m the only one left who knows that he had a godawful sweet tooth and that he liked to hum while he washed the dishes and that he could never stop goddamn biting his pens and pencils and that it was practically his life mission to take up as much space as possible on the couch. And he loved to dance, and he was great at baseball, and he liked reading comics and novels but he thought nonfiction was boring. He—he loved science fiction, there’s so much about the future he’d be excited about if—” Steve cut himself off with something that was either a laugh or a sob, breathing hard. “I guess I could keep going, but I don’t know what more to tell you. He was there all my life and then he was gone, and I swear he took half of me with him.”

Natasha closed her eyes and clenched her free hand in the covers of the bed. Of course, of course, James had seen Steve Rogers too, when everyone else thought that there wasn’t much there to see. The litany of habits and preferences didn’t ring a bell for her, but then it wouldn’t. There was no room for those things in the Red Room. But that James Barnes had seen something in Steve Rogers, that he had seen the man who would become Captain America, that was enough. Because he had seen Natalia too, the girl under the Black Widow, and if he had been right about Steve, then maybe—she was more certain than ever now that James Barnes had been there, in the Winter Soldier she had known.

She turned towards the photos of James from the file, still on the bed with her, and looked this time at the photo of Steve’s James. The one who liked to dance and who gnawed on pencils, who sprawled carelessly across a couch, all long legs and eye-crinkling smile. “You loved him.”

“Yeah, of course. I still do. Don’t think I could ever stop, he’s my family.” Steve’s answer was immediate, and after a pause, he continued, voice thick with emotion, “I just want to bring him home. I want him safe. It’s my fault this even happened to him.”

“Steve. You know it’s not.” 

He let out a long, shuddering breath. “Sure.” And then, a little wryly, “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

She owed Steve an explanation, but she didn’t know enough to even start to explain it to him without upsetting him more. She’d tell him more when she had filled in some of the gaps, when she had something concrete to show him. 

“Yes, I think so. Thank you.”

* * *

 

By the time she met Fury for their morning routine of breakfast and briefing, held today in Fury’s half of a set of double rooms in a seedy hotel, Natasha’s head was clear and all traces of the night before wiped clean from her face. She knew she wasn’t off the roller coaster yet, knew there were more memories gathering force and momentum to jerk her through all new twists and turns. “I love him,” Natalia had said, and they hadn’t just been empty words. She knew what she had to do now.

She had her copy of the Winter Soldier file open on the room’s single tiny desk, alongside a piece of paper on which she had handwritten what she knew of both her and James’ timelines. There was a blank space on both of them in the early 1980s. Natasha’s resurfacing memories were filling in some of that blank space, but she had to know more, and she had no convenient justification to offer Fury about why she had to know now, why she couldn’t leave it alone and pursue it later when they weren’t busy chopping off HYDRA heads left and right. Fury was unlikely to want to help on what might amount to a wild goose chase anyway. Still, she wasn’t willing to just cut and run without letting Fury know what she was up to.

When Fury came in bearing breakfast, Natasha simply nodded at the desk, so he deposited breakfast with her where she was sitting on the made bed and sat at the desk. He had seen the Winter Soldier file already of course, but now she could see him matching the dates on her timelines to the contents of the file. Natasha sipped on her coffee and picked at her breakfast while she waited for him to finish. When he was done, he closed the file and turned to her with an expectant eyebrow raised.

“I think I was 18 or so when they brought him in to train with us. I was his best student, and we worked well together, got sent out on a lot of missions. We both had a year or two without any wipes.”

“And then he got transferred to the American branch of HYDRA. Makes sense, mid-80s was around the time Pierce joined HYDRA.” Fury was watching her carefully, and Natasha forced herself to keep her grip on her coffee cup light.

“We tried to get out, I think. I knew his name, James must have remembered it somehow, because I knew his name and—they caught us. That’s why I don’t remember much, from before my supposed birthdate.” 

She thought she sounded fine: normal, calm, like this was any other briefing. But something must have been giving her away because Nick was suddenly gentle. “What did you remember last night, Natasha?” 

“What they, what Lukin, did to us. Did you know they shoved James in the cryotank without sedating him? It took time for him to freeze, and he was awake.” It wasn’t particularly relevant, but it was the one horror she couldn’t let go of even hours later, and the one that wasn’t explicitly in the file, the one only someone who was there would know about. “And then, I don’t know, Lukin did something to me. Injected me with something.” It would be nice to know exactly what the hell Lukin had done.

“And then a wipe.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Nick’s eye was steady and warm on hers. “What do you need?” Relief flooded her, almost turning the straight line of her spine to water and pricking new tears in her eyes, but she held herself upright and and kept her eyes on Nick.

“I need my missing years back.”

“Alright. Lay it out for me then, give me the game plan.”

So she did.

* * *

 

By now, there was little left of Department X and the Red Room but rumors and legends, and a few scattered operatives and officials who capitalized on those rumors and legends, Natasha herself included. As the Cold War had wound down, Department X became just one more casualty of glasnost and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, collapsing along with the KGB after the August coup attempt in 1991. Natasha had taken advantage of the chaos to escape the Red Room, and she had been far from the only one to do so. For years she’d dodged and destroyed the remnants of Department X, alternately laying low and working as a mercenary and freelance agent, and doing her best to wipe her trail clean after her. Those hadn’t been good years. She hadn't been a person so much as a raw nerve of fight-or-flight impulse, and she still didn’t entirely know what the hell Clint had seen in her that had made it worth bringing her in instead of killing her.

Looking back, she and Fury could see HYDRA’s insidious tendrils in all of it. HYDRA had been sowing chaos on both sides, with Department X, the Red Room, and assorted HYDRA offshoots working sometimes in tandem, sometimes in opposition, either way adding entropy to an already compromised system. Hindsight made the big picture easy to see; it was detail she needed now. Fury had said earlier that analysis of the ties between the Red Room and HYDRA was low priority, but those ties were her main lead for tracking down her and James’ lost years. 

Nick agreed and said, “We need to start with when Department X fell apart along with the KGB.”

“We?” Natasha had expected to lay out her information, sketch out her plan, and then go on her merry way with or without Fury’s blessing. “We” hadn’t been part of her plan.

“Yeah, we. I’ve got some contacts in Russia that I think could help us.”

“Tracking down my ancient history isn’t exactly a priority right now, Nick. I can look into it on my own, leave you to work on dealing with HYDRA. I just wanted to let you know.”

“If it’s what you need, it’s a priority right now.”

Natasha didn’t know what to do with that. She didn’t expect what she needed to factor into Nick’s priorities, not really. If she hadn’t known it before, she certainly knew it after he let her think he was dead. She should have just left a note and gone.

“It’s really not. There’s about a dozen, maybe more, potential HYDRA bases to hit in Europe and you’re trying to get a new SHIELD going. This is just my midlife crisis, you don’t—”

“This is my priority right now, Tasha,” he interrupted, all command, but then continued with a gentleness she almost couldn’t stand, “Let me help you. Let me help Barnes. What happened to him…that’s on SHIELD too.”

This was as much for him as it was for her, she realized. Nick was used to dirty work and living in the shadowy gray world between moral absolutes, would do any number of awful things if he counted the cost worth the greater safety of the world. It was why he had thought Insight was worth it. Finding out he had strayed a little too far into the shadows had done a number on him. Helping her, helping James—that was firmly in the lighter shade of gray, along with helping refugee SHIELD employees and burning HYDRA’s remaining heads. Even so, if she told Nick no now, he would accept it and leave her alone, and whatever was broken between them would stay broken. If she told him yes…

“Okay. Let’s start with your contacts then,” she said, and though Nick didn’t smile, some tension in his face eased in a way that suggested he would have smiled, if he hadn’t thought it would make Natasha flee. 

* * *

 

They took the train to Moscow, where both Nick and Natasha’s most likely leads were, and split up when they got there. After so long spent running from the remnants of Department X and the Red Room, it felt strange to pursue them actively, and that stirred up the opposing desires to run as fast and as far as she could, and to return to the Red Room’s suffocating embrace. That was just the vestiges of the programming talking. James might well have been struggling with the same thing. Natasha tried not to think of that, but maddeningly, her thoughts kept returning to James, fixated on both the idiotic minutia (was he sleeping enough? Did he have enough ammo? What was his supply situation like?) and the big picture questions (did he remember her? Did he remember Steve? Was he safe?), none of which she had any answer to. If this was how it was for her, she hated to think of how Steve was feeling. She at least had the constant trickle of returning memories to distract her, plus threatening, cajoling, and bribing her way through Moscow’s seedy espionage-adjacent underbelly.

It was grinding, awful work, going from person to person and facing the sneers and smirks of those who knew who she was. She could use a cover for some of the leads, but more of them required her to be Natasha Romanoff, Black Widow, and after the SHIELD leak, that was no cover at all. It was worse than being naked, having every past-his-prime lowlife former spy or informant throw some bit of her bloody past in her face while dangling the promise of unreliable intel in front of her. They were mostly willing to cooperate at least: her and Fury’s fig leaf of a cover for this entirely personal mission was that they were digging up HYDRA roots, and everyone short of other terrorist organizations was scrambling to disavow and burn any links to HYDRA before the likes of Interpol and MI-6 and the CIA took a too-close look at their sketchier, but still not-evil-Nazi operations. 

After a couple of weeks of running down leads and contacts, she and Fury finally got a name and an appointment with some mid-level, aging Kremlin bureaucrat who had worked in the Red Room in its final years. Natasha didn’t remember Udonov from the Red Room, but then she wouldn’t. According to Fury’s intel, Udonov had been one of the paper pushers who kept the whole enterprise going with paperwork and accounting, and the Black Widows hadn’t exactly had occasion to pop into the office to submit requisitions requests. Natasha kind of missed that, to be honest. SHIELD paperwork had been tedious in the extreme. She was sure Red Room paperwork had been the same, but pushing paper was always a transferable skill, and one that didn’t make you many enemies, so Udonov had managed to land on his feet easily enough in the new regime. His total lack of ambition meant that he had avoided attention over the years, and now that he was in his sixties, he was simply biding his time until he could take his retirement and drink himself to death like all the other men of his cohort.

Natasha was willing to oblige Udonov’s desire to do things the civilized way. And she knew his demand for a real appointment, in his office, was his attempt at insurance. If anything happened to him, the Kremlin would raise a hell of a stink about unauthorized rogue agents assassinating valued government employees, and Natasha had had enough of congressional hearings. So she dutifully dressed up in her finest nondescript office worker attire, and showed up for her appointment five minutes early. 

Udonov’s bored secretary made her wait for twenty minutes, which Natasha had expected. When she was finally shown into Udonov’s office, he stayed seated. He met her eyes squarely, but his gray mustache was quivering and there was sweat gathering at his temples. Quite possibly he hadn’t risen to greet her because he didn’t trust his legs to hold him. He had the florid and jowly look of a man who had taken to enjoying his alcohol a little too much lately. All in all, he ranked pretty low on her threat assessment scale.

“I have been expecting this, Widow. If you are here to kill me, please do me the courtesy of doing it a little more cleanly than your sister Yelena managed with Lukin. That was a very messy business, and entirely unnecessary.”

Natasha smothered a smile. Yelena had taken her own form of vengeance on the Red Room, and it had been a lot messier than Natasha’s. Natasha had just wanted out; Yelena had wanted blood.

“No, Mr. Udonov. I’m only here for information. I was told you might know what happened to the Red Room’s records, after its...dissolution.”

Udonov relaxed a little now that he was assured she wouldn’t kill him. “And what does a lovely young assassin like you want with some dusty papers?”

“Please, Mr. Udonov. You can’t have been ignorant of the Red Room’s ties to HYDRA. I’d like to make sure that is one head of the beast that does not rise again. I’m sure you understand why that’s in everyone’s best interests.”

He flapped a hand and said, “Yes, yes, best for the world, don’t want to be under HYDRA’s thumb...I know the high-minded reasons, Widow. Why is it in _my_ best interest?”

Natasha was prepared for that. “Your retirement and pension.”

Udonov snorted. “What pension?”

Natasha took a folded piece of paper from her bag and slid it across his desk. “This pension.” It had been a simple matter to...reallocate some funds to Udonov’s pension. And really, it was Udonov’s own money; Putin had been raiding pensions for years, so Natasha’s little bit of hacking was restoring justice, in a way. Udonov looked at the figures on the paper, and his lips twitched into a smile for a moment before he controlled himself.

“The Red Room’s records….this is not official, you understand.” Natasha nodded. “Certain requisition requests crossed my desk, as matters grew increasingly dire for the Red Room. A few of those requests were for trucks whose ultimate destination was Vozrozhdeniya Island. It was later brought to my attention that those requests were, shall we say, not in the best interests of the Red Room.” Udonov shrugged. “It was all paperwork to me, I had little to do with—” he gestured vaguely, attempting to encompass ‘all the horrific human experimentation and murder’ perhaps, or possibly ‘the crazy crypto-Nazis.’

“Of course. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Udonov. I trust this conversation will stay between us. I’m sure you’d like to have an uneventful retirement.” Natasha stood to leave, and Udonov twitched with an aborted flinch before standing himself.

“Certainly. You may rely on my discretion, Widow.”

* * *

 

“Vozrozhdeniya Island? Really?” Nick rubbed at his forehead and examined the satellite imagery on Natasha’s laptop with a frown.

Vozrozhdeniya Island was, technically speaking, no longer an island. As the Aral Sea had dried up, the island had become a peninsula, easily accessible to anyone willing to make the trek through the desert, and far from the shores of what was now the North and South Aral Seas. It was also no longer in Russia, its facilities abandoned now that the USSR had broken up, and the land itself was technically part of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Not that they especially wanted it. Vozrozhdeniya Island had been the site of the USSR’s biological weapons research and testing, and attempts to clean it up had been sporadic at best. Efforts had been made to clear out the literal tons of anthrax, but who knew what other deadly pathogens were lurking there, because after the workers had defected or deserted en masse, even desperate scavengers looking for salvage steered mostly clear of the abandoned lab complexes. Which was probably why some HYDRA-affiliated bright spark had decided it was the safest place to stash Department X and the Red Room’s records. Natasha wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to go there.

“Yeah, really. I’m betting that if there’s anything to find, it’s in the lab complexes, where it would be least likely to be disturbed or looted.” She circled the locations with her finger. The satellite imagery was current, thanks to Stark satellites, and showed a ghost town in a harsh desert landscape. She switched to an infrared view: no hot spots, so nothing was turned on or alive down there.

“Because any reasonable person would leave those labs alone what with not wanting to unleash the zombie plague.”

Nick was probably exaggerating about the zombie plague, but zombie plague wasn’t far off the mark. The facilities had done research on and weaponized everything from smallpox to Marburg, and it was probably only dumb luck that no world-ending pandemic had spread from there after it had been so sloppily abandoned. “We should wear full clean suits, just in case.”

“Those records had better be there,” muttered Nick as he continued to examine the satellite imagery, and Natasha made a noise of assent. Though there were other leads to follow if this didn’t pan out, they would take time that Natasha didn’t think they could afford. Whatever Nick said about this mission being his priority now, she knew he couldn’t drop everything else for too long.

For expediency’s sake, they asked Stark for discreet transport and gear, which meant Natasha had to suffer through Tony talking at her for about an hour as he vented his outrage over the whole SHIELD-was-HYDRA business and demanded the Avengers return to Stark Tower and by the way, what the hell was Cap doing? Where the fuck was Hawkeye? This was the worst superhero team ever, blah blah blah. However much Tony raved and complained though, he did always come through when it counted, so they were on a Stark Industries cargo jet within six hours, and parachuting into Vozrozhdeniya within sixteen. They had enough supplies for 72 hours, and a promise from Tony that a plane would be by with another supply drop or an extraction as needed, before he hung up abruptly.

Their drop put them in Vozrozhdeniya just after dawn. After the roar of the plane faded, the silence of the place was oppressive, the abandoned buildings eerie in the weak dawn light. Even the air was still. Natasha felt certain that she and Nick were the only living things for miles.

They put on their clean suits and walked through the ghost town of Kantubek, where the base’s employees had lived, and on to the lab complexes. There was something especially disquieting about places like this one that were incompletely abandoned. There were trucks still sitting in the town garage, and the buildings themselves looked normal until you got closer and saw the broken windows and gutted interiors.

The lab complexes had remained mostly intact though, clearly built to better standards. Labs 1 through 3 yielded nothing but empty cages, untouched glassware, dusty equipment, and gritty sand. None of it lit even the barest flicker of recognition in her mind. These weren’t like the Red Room’s labs: there was no indication of experimentation on humans. Natasha was grateful for that.

They returned to Kantubek to take shelter for the night in one of the old residence halls, long since looted of anything of use, but at least still offering shelter from the cold desert night. A bit of a breeze had kicked up with nightfall, and it set Kantubek’s broken buildings to creaking and groaning. The sounds had Nick visibly on edge. Natasha took the first watch, but when it was her turn to sleep, not even her exhaustion was enough to overcome the marrow-deep unease she felt in this place. It was just too fucking quiet. She managed only a couple hours of a dozing sleep, half-dreaming of cages and examination tables, of something burning in her veins.

The next day, Lab 5 yielded results. With only two labs left to check and nothing but creepy and hopefully no longer infectious scientific equipment to show for it, Natasha had been beginning to lose hope. The clean suit was stifling in the already hot air, and Vozrozhdeniya’s near total silence was making her jumpy. Nick was none too happy either, frequently muttering dire imprecations against all the idiots who had abandoned Vozrozhdeniya so precipitously. It was good for them though, because it meant whoever had stashed the Red Room files in Lab 5 had been sloppy. Maybe it had been meant to be a temporary location, because it wasn’t exactly a professional job: a filing cabinet had been shoved in front of a door to hide it, scuffs and scrapes along the floor and wall making it clear that the cabinet had been moved.

She and Nick moved the cabinet out of the way and regarded the locked door behind it warily.

“Y’know, I’ve seen this movie. It ends in zombies.”

“You’re really fixated on zombies, Nick.”

“We’re in a creepy abandoned biological weapons lab. In over twenty years, even desperate looters weren’t stupid enough to come snooping around in here too much, and apparently even HYDRA never bothered to come back because they were too scared of catching some horrible zombie plague.”

“Alternatively, the guy who relocated the files died before he managed to tell anyone with HYDRA what he did.”

“You better hope that’s the answer,” said Nick, and shot out the door’s lock.

They entered the room carefully, but on first inspection it was just a supply closet. There were cleaning supplies, some boxes of paper, old printers and phones: normal office detritus. Natasha examined the shelves and the walls behind them, while Nick kneeled on the floor to feel for any seams or switches. Her inspection yielded nothing more interesting than a dusty bottle of vodka hidden behind the paper towels. Nick had better luck. He banged on one segment of the floor and a heavy metallic sound rang out, and after some feeling around, they located the mechanism that opened a heavy, lead-lined trap door.

The door opened with a clang and squeal of disused metal to reveal a ladder going down into the darkness. Natasha pulled a flare from her pack, cracked it open, and tossed it down into the total dark. It fell a short distance, ten or so feet it looked like, and illuminated what was either part of a long narrow room or the start of a tunnel. The flare’s fizzing crackle seemed very loud in the silence, but the sound didn’t echo much, so the room or tunnel couldn’t be too big.

“I’ll go first. That way you can make a break for it if the zombies attack.”

“Ha ha,” replied Nick, and pulled out his sidearm just in case. The underground room was a possible entrance and exit they hadn’t accounted for, so who knew who or what was down there.

Natasha made her way carefully down the ladder, testing each rung before putting her whole weight on it in case it was rusted through. The ladder held, and she hopped off the last rung on to hard-packed earth. She swept the beam from her flashlight around the space, which wasn’t a tunnel, but a fallout shelter of some sort, or considering the location, perhaps more of a quarantine room of last resort. Past the ladder were boxes labelled as rations and a few barrels of what was probably water, and on the other side—Natasha felt her stomach drop. More boxes, dozens of them, with at least half of them tipped over, files and papers spilling out of them, other papers scattered all around the room in haphazard piles. Someone had already been here.

“Natasha?”

“The room’s clear. And I think I found the records.”

Nick joined her where she was staring at the mess of Red Room records. “Looks like someone else was looking for something too.”

It had been an undisciplined sort of tossing of the room, the sort hired muscle would have done, or maybe someone who didn’t really know what they were looking for. And since there had been no signs of recent disturbance in or around the hidden supply closet, it was likely that it had been done shortly after the records had been hidden in the first place. Natasha took a deep breath and moved towards the nearest discarded stack of papers. On top of the stack was a memo about training protocols, dated 1965; the next paper was a requisitions request for cold weather gear from 1978; the next, a surveillance log from 1981. She went from pile to pile of files and papers, and it was the same. None of it was in any sort of order. The silence and the darkness and the horrible abandoned emptiness of Vozrozhdeniya pressed down on her and in that moment, Natasha would have given fucking anything for a computer terminal to hack or some zombies to shoot. Anything but this pit of impenetrable paper that knew more about her past than she did.

“Well? Let’s get started.”

“Where?” Her throat felt tight with her sudden despair, and she tossed aside the useless reports she was holding.

“Natasha. Don’t tell me the Black Widow can be defeated by some goddamn paper. Where do we start?”

Natasha squeezed her eyes shut against the prickle of angry tears. She might almost have preferred finding nothing to this. If the answers she needed weren’t in this disaster— She shoved aside the surge of hopelessness and frustration, and looked at the mess of records again. “We start with the boxes.”

The untouched boxes at least still had some semblance of organization, even if they were unlabelled. They got through a couple dozen of them quickly enough, and they were just boring administrivia and surveillance logs. One of the tipped over, messy boxes yielded the first records of interest: the genesis of the Black Widow program in the 1930s. The protocols laid out in the reports and memos were the stuff of even her nightmares. Natasha understood now what that old Red Room trainer had meant when he had said Natasha’s cohort of Black Widows had it easy. Her time in the Red Room hadn’t been a cakewalk, but at least she hadn’t been handcuffed to her damn bed at night. She set those documents aside and kept looking.

Hours passed as she and Nick looked through document after document, sorting them chronologically in some effort to impose order. Nick would occasionally let out a little huff or exclamation, muttering about how it would have been nice to have known that twenty years ago, or that so-and-so was a fucking liar. Natasha, for her part, was learning more about the Red Room’s boring inner workings than she had ever cared to know. And none of it triggered any new memories.

Night fell above ground, but they kept working. Natasha assumed Nick wanted to make their original extraction time; Natasha simply wasn’t willing to leave until she had some semblance of an answer about her missing years, any answer. When she finally found a document with her name on it though, she didn’t have some epiphany, and there was no floodgate of previously lost memories bursting open. The mission report with her name on it stayed just a mission report, and Natasha didn’t remember a damned thing about the mission described in it. The next one was a training evaluation: laudatory, of course. And then a medical report, another mission report, a memo….by dawn, she and Nick had amassed a neat stack of files about eight inches thick. There was another much shorter stack of files on James, mostly reports and evaluations, some of it filling in those blank spots from the file she had given Steve. There wasn’t time to read all of it now; they had a plane to catch. Nick would send someone for the rest of the records when it was convenient.

They emerged from the darkness of Lab 5’s underground shelter to a blazing Vozrozhdeniya morning. Outside, there was still no noise, but the sunlight was its own kind of loud, the building heat palpable through Natasha’s clean suit. Natasha wanted to strip it off and run and scream, anything to puncture Vozrozhdeniya’s stillness and silence, to fill the still gaping holes in her mind. She didn’t of course, and settled instead for matching Nick’s brisk jog towards Vozrozhdeniya’s Barkhan airfield, the files a steady weight in the pack on her back. A small cargo plane was waiting for them at the airfield. The pilot eyed their clean suits warily but hustled them aboard anyway, and they were in the air in minutes. They were headed for a Stark Industries facility in Gulmira, where Tony assured them over speakerphone that there would be a clean room ready for decontam and a fully equipped safe house they could plan their next moves from. 

“Am I gonna get an explanation about what the hell is going on any time soon, by the way? Because Hill is terrifyingly competent and all, but she’s not very chatty. And cleaning up this clusterfuck stateside while you guys are off on your assorted road trips of secrecy is not fun at all.” Natasha was surprised Tony had managed to hold out so long against demanding answers, and made a note to send Maria some really nice booze for having had to deal with Tony in a snit.

“Have you talked to Steve?” she asked.

Tony snorted. “Have I talked to—he called, gave me a heads up on his world tour of HYDRA destruction, asked for some stuff, I hooked him up. He wasn’t very forthcoming.” Translation: they fought. “So? What the hell are you all doing? Manhunt for the Terminator?”

“Kind of,” hedged Fury. “We’re on clean up duty, Stark, and I assure you, we’re not having fun.”

“Yeah, well you’re having more fun than I am, I fucking guarantee it. Because I’m stuck holding the bag on the Avengers Initiative since all the rest of you have fucked off to Bumfuck, Kazakhstan and Middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, and I will take a goddamn alien invasion over Congress any fucking day. I’ll take in all your SHIELD refugees, and I’ll yell at Congress and the press, and I will give you whatever shit you need for your road trips, but I want some answers. If I’m going to do this, it’s not so you can turn the Avengers into SHIELD 2.0, complete with potentially world-destroying secrets. I read the leaked files, Fury, which by the way, thanks, Natasha. You are my favorite other than Bruce right now for that. Mad-Eye Moody on the other hand—you signed off on Project Insight. Those helicarrier Death Stars used some of _my tech_.”

Natasha and Nick winced in tandem. Tony had reason to be furious, and Natasha was beginning to feel a little guilty about how they’d all left Tony to deal with the continued fallout. 

“I know. And I’m trying to make it right,” said Nick.

“Not enough,” fired back Tony. “I’m done with this super spy, secret bullshit. Not even Cap will tell me what the hell he’s doing, so from where I’m standing, the Avengers aren’t much of a—”

“I will. I’ll tell you.” Fury turned to her in shock and she shrugged. “What can I say, I’m into this whole openness and transparency thing.” She was also into Tony not throwing a total, justified shitfit, and figured she should provide positive reinforcement for those few times Tony was being a good team player. Steve was probably going to yell at her, but too bad. If— _when_ they brought James in, they’d need Tony on their side. 

So she gave Tony the highlights reel, sans any too personal revelations, and hoped for the best.

When she was done, Tony was silent for a moment. “Well. Can’t say I was expecting any of that.”

“No one was,” said Nick, tipping his head back against his seat wearily.

“Bucky Barnes is the cyborg assassin who was the terror of DC. Huh. You and Cap want him back, like with Barton?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

“Give me some time to process! But yeah, that’s it. Send me what you’ve got on Barnes, keep me in the loop, let me know if you need anything.”

This would probably blow up on them in some spectacular fashion down the line, but for now, Natasha was just grateful. “Thank you, Tony.”

* * *

 

Natasha napped for the rest of the flight to Gulmira, sliding dizzily into dreams almost the moment she shut her eyes. 

_Natalia hasn’t seen the American in weeks. She has silenced the urge to ask after him, has forced her eyes to not roam the halls and training rooms looking for him. She worries he’s left a visible mark on her: not a love bite or a bruise, but something deeper. She has been changed; surely it must be visible. Surely someone must sense this irritable fizz under her skin that has only buzzed stronger the longer he’s been absent. But it isn’t, and they don’t, because she is Natalia Alianovna Romanova, one of 28 Black Widows, and the best of them all. So when she sees him walking down the hall accompanied by his handlers, she only spares him a brief glance and he doesn’t look at her at all. Natalia feels it though, this new thing between them. It burns steady in her chest and she hopes the light of it doesn’t leak out._

_They get a moment alone in one of the training rooms later, one of the ones with gymnastics equipment. Natalia is at the barre, stretching. She’s between missions, and by now has enough seniority to be left to her own devices sometimes, within limits. Natalia tends to spend most of her free time training, the better to keep up her skills. To be the best requires hard work, and she won’t be like some of the other Widows, who let the fine edge of their skills dull after a few successful missions. She is a weapon, and weapons need to be maintained. Right now, her muscles are alive with the memory of ballet as she moves through stretches that she doesn’t remember ever having learned._

_“How was your mission, Soldier?” She keeps her voice cool, though she knows her eyes are probably betraying her pleasure, trained on him in the mirror as they are._

_“Successful. And all for the glory of Mother Russia, of course.” He matches her tone even as the curl of his mouth says what he really thinks. He’s easy to read when you look close enough. And Natalia always looks close enough, especially when it comes to him. Her stretches morph into snatches of choreography. The American’s eyes are intent on her._

_“Do you dance?”_

_“Not like this.”_

_She stops her pirouette and looks at him. He would stand out in the Bolshoi, and he isn’t the sort of asset they send undercover to fancy parties. “Like what, then?”_

_He frowns, eyes distant, but Natalia knows: the body remembers. So she walks towards him, and when she’s in his reach, his metal hand settles at her waist, cool through her uniform, and his other hand takes hers. He leads and she follows in a clumsy three step. They stumble through a few steps to nonexistent music, only barely finding a rhythm. They were more graceful together when they sparred, thinks Natalia ruefully. But they’re closer like this. She likes being close like this._

“Natasha, we’re here.”

She blinked and moved to rub her eyes, before she remembered she was in a clean suit. “I’m up.”

They disembarked and the pilot led them to the Stark Industries facility’s clean room, where they could finally strip down and clean up. From there, a chatty driver took them to a low stone house, safe behind a discreetly thick wall and gate covered in climbing roses. The scent of roses hung thick in the air, almost drugging after the filtered air of her clean suit, and it lingered through much of the tidy and spartan safe house. The place wasn’t full of the Stark-style amenities she might have expected, but the kitchen was stocked and she and Nick made a beeline for it. There was a proper samovar, to Natasha’s delight, and some simple, obviously locally prepared food. They ate it standing up, Natasha’s mind wandering back to the dream she was woken out of, then to the files waiting in her pack. If she could have, she’d have downloaded them straight to her brain. But over 72 hours on precious little sleep meant her eyes weren’t up to the task of reading yet more files, so she followed Nick’s not-really-a-suggestion to “hit the sack, at least four hours, I mean it.”

* * *

 

Natasha felt considerably more human after a solid six hours of sleep. She padded into the common space adjoining the small kitchen, where Nick was already seated at a table, files spread out in front of him. The samovar was burbling happily, and there was a small spread of flat bread, soft cheese, and fruit waiting. There were definitely perks to using Stark Industries’ resources, even when Tony Stark was mad at you. A safe house with staff was one of them. Natasha poured herself some tea, and settled down at the table to work.

Nick had James’ file, so she opened up her own and began at the beginning. She might as well have been reading a target’s file. She read carefully, and as before at Vozrozhdeniya, no memories flooded forth. Her intake report into the Black Widow program told her what her estimated year of birth was (1964), where she had been found (an orphanage in Stalingrad, her name pinned to her clothes), what was known about her family (very little, aside from what her name itself told them). The other early files told her little she didn’t already know, one way or the other, and she wasn’t particularly interested in revisiting the greatest hits of a Red Room childhood. Besides, she was reliably informed by people with normal childhoods that many of their childhood memories formed a hazy and amorphous whole punctuated by the occasional bright and clear memory. Natasha was fine with her childhood memories staying in that hazy and amorphous place.

It was the early 1980s Natasha was really interested in. That was where the biggest holes in her memory were, and she knew now that was at least partly because that was when she had known James, and when Lukin had begun his experimenting in earnest. That was when Lukin had made her unknow James. The first few reports of her training and missions with James were familiar, and then the next few elicited not even the vaguest sense of recognition. But this report, of a mission in Korobitsyno— _After successful completion of mission, Winter Soldier and Black Widow Romanova were forced to take shelter in an abandoned cabin due to adverse weather conditions. Rendezvous at extraction point was delayed for 43 hours_ ….They had been tasked with ensuring that some functionary or another had a deadly skiing accident, and they had been making their way to their extraction point when they had been caught in a blizzard—

_Natalia has a lot of skills, but wilderness survival and cross-country skiing are not among the more polished parts of her skill set. She’s glad the Winter Soldier is with her, because she’s not confident she would have been able to find shelter in the midst of this rapidly worsening blizzard. She wants to make a crack about the Winter Soldier living up to his name, but she’s shivering too hard even now that she’s out of the driving snow. The cabin they’ve broken into is rustic, to put it generously, but it has an intact roof and a fireplace, so it will keep them alive through this storm. The Soldier dumps his pack and immediately goes back outside, returning in a few minutes with a few cords of firewood._

_“Is it dry?” she asks through shivers. She supposes they could burn the furniture if it came down to it. Or maybe not, she thinks, casting an eye around the small cabin. It’s a barebones hunter’s cabin, with little in the way of furniture aside from a table, chair, and bed. A stag’s head stares from one of the walls, the only real decoration. There isn’t even a bathroom; there must be an outhouse somewhere outside._

_“It was under a tarp,” answers the American. He isn’t shivering despite the cold. Natalia would worry about hypothermia, but his movements are as easy and fluid as ever as he gets a fire started. Once the fire is crackling, he begins stripping off his bulky cold weather gear. Natalia moves close to the fire to do the same. They’ll warm up better with shared body heat and the fire. He grabs a scratchy woolen blanket from the cabin’s single bed and puts it and his arms around her, chafing roughly at her arms and hands to warm them, and Natalia leans into his solid warmth._

_“Aren’t you cold too?” It feels like he’s giving off as much heat as the fire._

_“I’ve been colder.” Once her shivering has stopped, he leaves her with the blanket to light a few lanterns and examine the cabin. Natalia would really prefer he come back to join her._

_“I suppose we’ll have to wait out the storm and hope we don’t get entirely snowed in. They’ll know why we haven’t made the rendezvous at least.”_

_“Yes.”_

_He’s staring out the cabin’s single window, arms crossed almost protectively around himself, and Natalia edges close to him to see what he’s staring at. The view is nothing but gray and white, so she turns her attention to him instead. Even after a year of being out and about on missions, he is still the most handsome man she’s ever seen. Between the firelight and the glare of snow outside, the planes of his face are thrown into sharp relief, and his hair is a little damp from the snow and falling over his eyes. She wants to reach up and brush it away from his face. She wants other things too, things spurred on by countless sparring sessions and almost a dozen missions: she wants to kiss him and she wants him inside her and she wants to be allowed to touch someone for reasons that have nothing to do with training or a mission or the Red Room. Natalia just wants. But the American’s jaw is tight with some nameless emotion and his unblinking gaze at the snow is worrying her. She’s about to venture a touch on his arm to get his attention when he shivers with a brief, abortive shudder and turns to her._

_“Take the bed, get some rest. I’ll take first watch.”_

_She’s about to argue that surely she should take first watch, given that he had been the one doing the hard work of breaking their path through the snow, but one look at his rigid posture and she guesses how well that will go over. She decides to take the sneakier approach instead. “You can take first watch from the bed. Come keep me warm.” Natalia goes to the bed to turn down the covers and shove the bed into a more advantageous position._

_“You’re in no danger of hypothermia.”_

_“Maybe not, but it’s still cold and you might as well be a heater you’re so warm. Keep watch from the bed. Bears wouldn’t be out in this storm, much less people.”_

_When the bed and sheets are arranged to her satisfaction, Natalia wrestles her boots off and gets under the covers, shooting the Soldier an expectant look. He takes one last glance out the window, then comes to take a seat on the edge of the bed. His alert posture has finally loosened a little. He takes his own boots off and tucks them under the bed, and when he straightens, he grimaces and presses his right hand against his left shoulder. Natalia frowns and sits up._

_“Are you injured? You should have said something—”_

_The Soldier shakes his head and says, “No, it always aches in the cold. Where the metal meets the skin.” Oh. She had forgotten about his metal arm, covered up as it is. His lips quirk into a small grim smile at her awkward silence. “It does not affect my functionality. Sleep. I’ll wake you for your watch.”_

_He settles beside her on the narrow bed, sitting up with his legs crossed at the ankle and a gun on his lap. Natalia curls into his warmth a little, and drops quickly off to sleep. When he wakes her a few hours later, it’s dark outside and the shadows from the fire and lanterns render the cabin simultaneously eerie and cozy. It’s still snowing: they’ll have to dig out by the time this storm has run its course._

_Natalia gets up to stretch and eat some food while the American takes her place on the bed. By the time she’s finished her rations and added some wood to the fire, he’s asleep. This is the first time she’s seen him sleep on a mission, and she finds herself struck by the sight, by how utterly human it is. She knows he isn’t the machine some of the other Widows and Red Room staff consider him to be. She has seen him laugh, and no machine would look at her the way he does, as if there is something there to see other than a Black Widow. In sleep, the careful blankness of his face has eased into something softer. Surely he had had a name, once._

_She tears her eyes away from him and paces the cabin to inventory its resources. She’s sure the American has done so already, but she needs something to do that isn’t staring at his face. When she’s done with that, she stretches some more, and does what exercises she can in the small space without waking her partner. She thinks of what they can do to fill the time when they’re both awake. She knows what she wants to do. She wants—_

_She stops mid-crunch and lies back down, staring blankly at the cabin’s exposed beams. They’re in an isolated cabin, snowed in, and the Red Room has no idea where they are. There is no surveillance here, and there’s probably no other person for kilometers. She could have no better opportunity to go for what she wants, and what she wants is the American. What she wants is to choose a man for herself only, to not think of the disgusting smirks of her handlers as they murmur, “did you bite his head off after you finished with him, Widow? That’s what Black Widows do, isn’t it—” to have something like the untarnished pleasure of taking a bite of chocolate cake at a diplomat’s dinner when it wasn’t required by the mission._

_Natalia lets herself consider her desires thoroughly now, when before she had mostly let them float briefly across the surface of her mind. Anticipatory heat gathers between her legs and her pulse beats faster. So: Natalia wants.Does the Winter Soldier? He’s never done or said anything overtly sexual. His eyes have occasionally lingered on her breasts, but, well, he’s a man, and her breasts are fantastic. She turns her head to look at him sleeping on the bed. He’s sprawled out some from his initial position, face turned towards her with one arm flung up and the other curled on his stomach. The position puts the lean length of his torso on display, and makes him look thoroughly, disarmingly human. Not a weapon or a machine or the terrifying Winter Soldier, but just a man. A beautiful man at that, she thinks, staring at the sweet downturn of his mouth._

_By the time he wakes a couple of hours later, the sky outside has lightened to gray and Natalia is certain a person could die of waiting. She’s made up and discarded dozens of seduction plans waiting for him to wake up._

_“Status?” he asks, voice a little rough from sleep. She’s so worked up she can practically feel his voice on her skin like a physical caress. She has to cross her legs tight to stop herself from rocking into the chair._

_Her own voice comes out husky. “Snowfall is much lighter now, but visibility is poor out there. Nothing else to report.”_

_He gets up to take a look out the window before walking back towards the bed to put his boots back on. “We’ll head out tomorrow to be sure the storm has passed us by. I’ll go get some more firewood, and some snow for water.”_

_As he opens the door to break a path through the snow, Natalia considers stripping and lying naked on the bed for his return. No, that’s what she would have done with a mark. She’s discarded all her plans as being things she would only do to a mark. It doesn’t leave her with much. By the time the American comes back inside, Natalia is pacing around the cabin again._

_“Stir crazy already?”_

_As soon as he sets the bucket of snow and the firewood down, she’s on him. Surprising him would probably be a good way to get her neck snapped so she makes sure to telegraph her movements when she tugs at his neck and stands on her tiptoes to kiss him. She keeps her eyes open and sees the rapidly melting snowflakes glittering in his long eyelashes, sees the guarded confusion in his eyes. He stills when she kisses him, and though his lips are warming under hers, he makes no move to return the kiss. Natalia feels stupid: had they taken this from him too, along with his name?_

_“What are you doing, Natalia?” He gently takes her hands off of him and steps back from her._

_“I’m kissing you. Or trying to.”_

_“This isn’t part of the mission,” he says, shaking his head. He looks almost frightened, and Natalia would prefer anger to that._

_“I know that. This is just—I want you.”_

_“I don’t know what lies are going around the Red Room, but I don't—this isn’t part of the training and it’s not your mission.”_

_Natalia lifts her chin to meet the American’s stare. She’ll spell it out if she has to. “What did I just say? I know that. This is me, choosing. I want you. I want to have sex with you.” She falters when she sees how tense he is. “You can say no, if you don’t, if you can’t—But I want to do this with someone I choose for once.”_

_It’s a struggle to meet the American’s intense scrutiny, somehow more terrifying and nerve-wracking than that first time she had met his eyes when all she knew about him was Red Room gossip. She doesn’t think he would hurt her, and he still looks more confused than angry, but all of a sudden she remembers some of the more gruesome stories about what the Winter Soldier could do to a Black Widow. But no, there, he licks his lips, and his eyes flicker towards her mouth, the pupils dilating even further in the low light. He wants her. She’s sure of it. He takes a step towards her and cups her face with his flesh hand, eyes searching her face for some sign, and he must find it, because he bends to kiss her._

_He starts a little clumsy and slow, as if he’s out of practice. Well, he probably is; she doubts the Red Room is willing to use him as a honeypot. The metal arm is too distinctive if nothing else. As he gradually deepens the kiss, Natalia thinks muzzily that maybe he should be a honeypot. He’s certainly good enough. He sets a slow, drugging pace to their exchange of kisses, and Natalia’s so caught up in the feeling of his mouth on hers, in the heat of his nearness, she almost doesn’t notice the cool hand at her waist and the way he walks them both back to the bed. She turns them around at the last moment and gently pushes him onto the bed to straddle his lap. He’s growing hard, she can feel it, and she grinds down against him, drawing a moan from them both._

_Natalia wants to go faster, wants to fuck him already. She’s been wet for ages, waiting for this. She rocks against him faster and pulls away from his damnably appealing mouth to strip off her sweater and and the tank top under it. He makes a small noise of appreciation when he sees her breasts, and reaches back to undo the clasp of her bra, laying down a trail of kisses from her neck to her breasts as he does it, and it feels like her skin blooms into heat wherever his lips have been._

_“Tell me what you want,” he murmurs, before turning his attention to her nipples. She arches into the touch of his hands, one incongruously cool, the other so warm. She wants more, she wants—_

_“I want you to fuck me already.”_

_His mouth curls wickedly at that and he pushes his hips up towards her teasingly. Natalia tugs at his hair in retaliation and pulls him in for another kiss, biting and rough this time. He pulls back with a quiet laugh, but he’s panting a little now._

_“Have a little patience, Natalia.”_

_She growls in response and leaves a series of biting kisses down his jaw and neck. That draws a moan from him and the sound goes straight to her cunt, but he has the nerve to pull away and deftly roll her onto the bed._

_“I’m not one of your marks,” he says, and tugs at her pants. “This doesn’t need to be a quick fuck for the mission objective.” She shimmies out of the pants, liking where this is going. But he doesn’t move to take off any of his own clothes, just spreads her thighs apart and brings his face down to nuzzle at her underwear, now damp with her arousal. He breathes her in for a moment, then kisses at her vulva through the fabric and it’s both too much and not enough so she makes some inarticulate noise and says, “Please, please please please—” and she’s not even sure what she's asking for._

_He finally pulls her underwear down, parts her folds a little with his fingers, and then licks into her. Natalia goes entirely boneless. No one had ever—his tongue brushes over her clit and he slides one finger into her, and any remaining intelligible thought flies out of her head. Here is a new avenue for his much vaunted relentlessness. He fucks into her slowly with both his tongue and his fingers, and Natalia writhes and moans above him, fists clenching in the sheets. All the sensation in her body has narrowed to where he’s touching her. He brings her close to the edge until, desperate, she fists a hand in his hair and tugs, and she sees a flash of blue-gray eyes, intent and a little amused, before he returns his attention to her cunt and finally, finally brings her off. Her orgasm rolls through her with a kind of force she’s never felt before, and she shakes with fine tremors in its wake._

_Natalia revels in the afterglow for a bit, enjoying the American’s rather smug smirk, before lunging up at him to take off his clothes. She doesn’t rip them, but it’s a close thing. Once he’s shirtless, he tenses up a little, self-conscious about his arm probably. And the scarring around the join between metal and skin really is awful, alternately pale and red, gnarled and burned. It looks like it would hurt all the time, not just in the cold. She runs her hands over it and the rest of his chest and shoulders lightly, and he lets her. His skin is so warm. She kisses him then, tasting herself on his lips, in his mouth._

_“Have I been patient enough?” she asks, and reaches down to cup his erection where it’s straining against his pants._

_He doesn’t answer, instead just stands to shuck off his boots and pants and underwear. He’s not self-conscious now, and certainly has no reason to be, thinks Natalia, eyeing his cock which is already wet with precome. They appraise each other for a moment, and Natalia memorizes the image of him looking warm and lovely in the flickering light of the fire, of him looking at her. He’s beautifully if brutally made, all lithe muscle honed for what she knows is deadly purpose. She remembers—she thinks, incongruously, of ballet dancers, of how corded with muscle those men are, for no purpose but to create beauty. She wonders how she looks to him, if her body is, in this moment, more art than weapon; she can’t quite read the look in his eyes._

_All thoughts of ballet fly from her head when he climbs on top of her, heavy and so, so warm. She strokes his cock and he smothers a moan against her shoulder as he jerks in her hand._

_“Natalia,” he whispers, and braces himself over her for a distractingly thorough kiss as she wraps her legs around him. It’s not the kiss that takes her breath away though. He had called her by her name. She’s done this with marks, with the Red Room trainer assigned to the purpose, and none of them—no one has ever—he slid into her then, making her cry out, and after a few mismatched thrusts, they settle into a rhythm._

_If he was a mark, Natalia would be moaning theatrically and praising his cock, doing whatever she could to urge him to finish in her. But he’s not, and Natalia wants this to last. She’s babbling about how good he feels inside her, asking for harder, more as she clutches him tight against her, and there’s no art or training in any of it, just desire and pleasure. He keeps his eyes on hers the whole time, and she has little trouble reading them now: they’re glassy with desire and pleasure, and Natalia is rapt. Who else has seen this? Has anyone?_

_He braces his whole weight on his metal arm, and uses his right hand to trace maddening circles against her over-sensitive clit. She jerks her hips faster, eyes fluttering closed. He speeds up to match her and practically chants her name, and when he presses hard on her clit, her orgasm lights up the world behind her eyes. She feels him come shortly after, and she opens her eyes to see the expression on his face, almost equal parts pain and pleasure. He stays inside her for a moment before kissing her again, chaste and close-mouthed, and then he pulls out of her and reaches for his clothes._

_Natalia quells the sudden sinking feeling in her stomach and casts about for her underthings. The languor of two very nice orgasms still fills her body, and she doesn’t regret anything, not really. This memory will carry her through the pawing and leering of lesser men. She has chosen this. Awkwardness with the Winter Soldier is a small price to pay. But that last kiss...that last kiss had said “thank you,” and “goodbye,” and Natalia doesn’t understand. She should, perhaps, have thought this through more._

_When the American is dressed and Natalia’s attempting to fix the mess they’ve made of her braided hair, he stares out through the window at the snow and says, “We shouldn’t have done that.”_

_“Will you tell them? Our handlers?”_

_He immediately goes tense. “No. Will you?”_

_“Of course not.” She can’t just leave it like that. She gets up and joins him at the window, peering up at his face. “You say we shouldn’t have done that. But I’m not sorry. Are you?”_

_“No. No, I’m not sorry, Natalia.”_

* * *

 

When she came out of the memory, Nick was looking at her with concern clear on his face. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” She rubbed at her face, which was definitely warmer than it should be, and got up to refill her now cold tea. This whole adventure might just have been worth it for that memory. Not just because of the sex, though that was certainly a pleasant memory to keep her warm at night. But because it was one almost entirely good thing clawed back from the Red Room. With hindsight, she understood James a little better now, why he had kissed her like it was goodbye. She understood the intensity with which he had scrutinized her, the way he had kept looking at her, so entirely present. He had been trying to commit everything to memory, even as he must have known it was futile. God, she had been young and stupid to not have guessed at the price James would have to pay for their trysts. To not have guessed at the price she would have to pay too.

Natasha returned to the files with new hope, hope that was at least a little rewarded as a series of missions came clear in her mind. It wasn’t the missions she cared about though. She cared about the pieces of Natalia Alianovna Romanova that were scattered through the memories of missions, like seashells and sea glass on the beach. She had to sift through the sand of the missions to find them: once she let the details of target and mode of termination and mission parameters fall through her mental fingers, the odd treasure was left. Little things, like laughing at a joke just because it was funny, or braiding her sister Widows’ hair, or stealing a book and reading everything she could before she had to throw it away. All these little rebellions, easily hidden from the Red Room, because they hadn’t even bothered to look, so long as the mission was completed and her obedience to Russia remained. _Your bodies are in service to the state,_ the Red Room had said. _There is nothing you have that was not given to you by the Red Room._ But the older Natalia had become, the more she had known that to be a lie as she had hoarded little moments free of being only a Black Widow. Many of those moments she had hoarded had been with James.  

So certain he wouldn’t hurt her or give her away, she had liked to crack the Winter Soldier facade, to chase after the little hints of the unnamed person at the core of him. Sometimes, she remembered, he had snapped at her for it, or had retreated into confused blankness. But other times he had been quietly pleased to rediscover that he liked his coffee black, with a truly ludicrous amount of sugar, or that he could recite prayers in Latin. Natalia, for her part, had been intoxicated with the intensity of his regard, had hungered for it like a plant seeking sunlight. Knowing what she knew now, Natasha wondered if Steve had felt the same way, because she understood now some of the wonder and confusion of Steve’s “I don’t know what he saw in me.” All she knew was that James had seen her, and that it had helped her feel real.

The Red Room hadn’t guessed at any of it. She read evaluations that simply remarked that the Winter Soldier and Black Widow Romanova worked very well together. Funnily enough, they had even asked James to evaluate her every so often, and he of course had given nothing away. Of a joint mission with the Stasi in Berlin, he had reported that “Romanova displays admirable adaptability in volatile situations,” and ha, she remembered that mission, was that how James had spun that one? But then, she mostly remembered what they had done afterwards—

* * *

 

_They are in a rundown hotel in East Berlin, on the run from the Stasi, because someone had apparently neglected to inform their comrades that the KGB was sending some operatives to take out their moles. The Soldier had been annoyed when their op was blown by the Stasi before they could wrap it up: Department X had sent them in with incomplete intelligence, and combined with how Department X’s Stasi contacts were entirely unaware that Department X had even sent any operatives at all, the entire mission was compromised. It was a bureaucratic clusterfuck of the sort that amused Natalia, so long as it didn’t get them killed, but her partner couldn’t abide the lack of professionalism. Luckily his mood had lightened when Natalia pointed out that it left them at least one full night free of the Red Room before they had to make it to their extraction point._

_After they sweep the room for bugs, they fairly wreck it in their haste to make love. It’s been weeks since they’ve had the chance to be alone, and as welcome as the sex is, Natalia thinks she might just treasure the respite of a shared bed more. Seeing the Winter Soldier soft in sleep is a rare sight indeed, so Natalia takes the time to commit it to memory. He stirs under her regard, and wakes to give her a sleepy smile that Natalia answers with a kiss. When she pulls back, he’s still smiling, eyes crinkling with it in that way she loves best. She brings her hand up to trace the faint lines in the corners of his eyes, the ones that evidence that he must have smiled often once._

_“You used to smile a lot, I think.”_

_He raises an eyebrow, indulgent and amused. “Oh? How can you tell?”_

_“These little crow’s feet,” she answers, brushing them with her fingers. She feels a terrible tenderness overtake her for the man he used to be, the one who smiled often enough that it left a mark on his young face. The Winter Soldier’s expression is usually smoothed to blankness now, with only the minutest shifts to give away his thoughts. When they’re alone though… He takes her hands in his, and brings them to his mouth to drop kisses on her knuckles, distracting her. His smile has turned sad and wry._

_“I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it.”_

* * *

 

She had been right, thought Natasha, once she shook free of the memory. James Barnes had smiled a lot. She set the file down and let her thoughts drift to the James of the present. Did he remember anything? Were memories coming back to him like they were coming back to her? Surely if she could recover some things from the wipe, than he could too, serumed up as he was. But then he had been wiped so much, so often…It didn’t matter. Memories or no memories, he deserved to come in from the cold. 

She returned her attention to the files, where she had reached a curious lacuna. There was a long stretch of 1984 in which there were no reports or evaluations or requisitions requests for her. There was a series of missions on file before then, both solo and with James or other Black Widows, then after that, nothing but solo missions. And no mention of the Winter Soldier at all. Nothing about what Lukin had done to her either, no mention of whatever it was that had burned through her and left her with this unnatural prolonged youth and slight physical edge. It was disappointing, but not especially surprising. Maybe Lukin or someone associated with him had been the one to ransack the files at Vozrozhdeniya, or maybe Lukin had seen the writing on the wall and liberated his research before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Red Room with it. And now Lukin was dead, thanks to her sister Black Widow Yelena, so there were likely no answers forthcoming from that corner. _Thanks a lot, Yelena,_ thought Natasha.

Natasha startled as Nick set down a plate of hot food in front of her. “So. What’ve you got so far?”

_The first time I kissed James. The time I stole a book for no reason other than that I wanted to. The first time I saw the ocean, and how I had to pretend it wasn’t anything remarkable. A big fat lot of nothing when it comes to just what kind of science experiment I am._

“Not enough, but better than nothing,” she answered, and gave Nick a brief rundown that tactfully glossed over the more intimate details. Nick ate as he listened, and Natasha picked at her own food as she spoke. She was a grown-ass woman and didn’t need Nick’s validation for her tragic assassin romance, but she hoped he wouldn’t think she was too compromised now. As soon as she was done, she shoved food into her mouth and hoped she wasn’t in for a lecture.

“You and the Winter Soldier, huh. ” Natasha nodded. “Can’t say I was expecting that. Does Rogers know?” She shook her head. “I’m guessing you’re gonna want to join his hunt for Barnes when I tell you what I found out.” Natasha stopped eating and gave him her full attention.

Nick tapped the stack of files in front of him. “Now, this isn’t Barnes’ whole file, because there’s nothing about the original…procedures. It is clear though that Department X didn’t have such a heavy hand when it came to the wipes and the conditioning, which is probably why he was so comparatively with it when you knew him compared to later. HYDRA wiped him a hell of a lot more apparently, because his memories kept coming back. Maybe his version of the serum kept healing him, or maybe it just stopped working right. Whatever it was, I’m a little less concerned now about whether there’s anything left of James Barnes.”

Natasha closed her eyes in relief, grateful for even this small measure of hope from an otherwise uninvested party. If Nick, who didn’t even really know James, thought there was a chance, then maybe… 

“What _is_ worrying is that he’s got a kill switch.” He slid one of the files over to her, and she skimmed it quickly. “Lukin’s work, and we can thank the fact that not even the theoretically Cold War-neutral branches of HYDRA were above Cold War pettiness. He wanted a way to eliminate the Winter Soldier if the wrong HYDRA types got a hold of him to use against Department X. There’s a little receiver in his metal arm that, if it gets the right signal, will send an immediately fatal dose of poison straight to his heart. It’ll do the same if someone tries to remove it without the transmitter and the right deactivation protocol.”

Natasha read the memo about it, which was light on scientific detail, but heavy on sniping about the American branch of HYDRA and how the Winter Soldier was obviously better off in the hands of Department X. There was some information on the mechanisms of the kill switch and the transmitter at least. It required proximity to activate, which was some relief, but there was no indication of who, if anyone, had the transmitter, or how to deactivate or remove the kill switch. The transmitter itself just looked like a nondescript little pager.

“How urgent of an issue do you think this is?”

“Pretty damn urgent. We’re lucky Barnes hasn’t tripped it himself, given that he must have gotten rid of any trackers that were on him. As it is, he’s making HYDRA’s life pretty difficult right now, hitting the bases the way he is, and there’s no way of knowing if one of those bases will have someone who can trip that kill switch. Any one of them could be a trap.”

“Then we need to find a transmitter, or figure out how to deactivate the kill switch without it. Are there any schematics here, any technical specs?”

“Just one diagram, Stark might be able to do something with it. We can send it over to him along with the rest of the Winter Soldier file, see what he can do. Any leads jumping out at you in that file?”

“Lukin’s dead, so that’s a dead end. But Yelena Belova killed him, and she was…pretty brutal when it came to taking Lukin out, made it clear it was personal. She basically razed his entire life to the ground,” said Natasha, and paused to think. Yelena had put on a hell of a show when she went after Lukin, and everyone even tangentially involved with the Red Room or Department X had read the threat in it, and accordingly left her alone. _Don’t try to resurrect the Red Room, or you’ll end up like Aleksandr Lukin._

“Everyone assumed she destroyed everything of Lukin’s, but I know her. She wouldn’t have, not with how potentially valuable his research and notes would have been. She wouldn’t have wanted to give up that advantage.”

Natasha had kept a wary eye on Yelena over the years, doing her best not to run afoul of her. As far as Natasha knew, Yelena was the only other Black Widow left. Yelena’s Red Room exit had been a lot splashier than Natasha’s, but then Yelena had always had a temper. Natasha had left her to it. And she had tried to work with her—

_With whispers of a coup growing, the writing is on the wall for the Red Room’s future. For every person jockeying for position or working for or against the coup, there are two whose only concern is to look out for themselves. Most of the Black Widows fall in the latter category, Natalia among them. So like so many others, Natalia has been quietly making arrangements for her exit from the Red Room. She has squirreled away money and supplies, established safe houses, carefully tested the waters with others who were making similar arrangements. When she spots signs that Yelena is doing the same, Natalia feels a brief surge of relief and hope. Maybe she won’t be alone when she leaves the Red Room. There’s some part of her that’s convinced she shouldn’t be leaving alone, that there’s an empty space in her escape plans. Maybe it’s Yelena she should be going with. She approaches Yelena in the showers (the only place she can be reasonably certain they won’t be overheard) to suggest it._

_Yelena does not respond well. Natalia dodges Yelena’s chokehold and binds her hands with a twisted up towel._

_“Do you want to get caught?” Natalia hisses at a still struggling Yelena._

_“I want you to get caught! Only one Black Widow is truly worthy of the title, and that is me. We are not sisters, and we are not allies. Or do you forget so soon how we graduated, Natalia?”_

_No. Natalia has not forgotten how they “graduated” from the Black Widow program. There had been 28 Black Widows in the Black Widow program before graduation. There were ten after it. Natalia herself had snapped Inna’s neck, garroted Ksenia, and strangled Svetlana. After unspecified malfunctions and failed missions in the intervening years, there were four Black Widows left. Only the fittest and the best could survive in the Red Room. Natalia supposes it was naive to hope things would be different outside of it._

“Belova’s probably our best lead then. Do you know where she is now?”

“Not exactly, but I know who knows. I can find her. She’s not gonna cooperate though, if she even has Lukin’s files. What she wants is to be the one Black Widow, and needless to say, I’m not keen on that idea.”

“Well, track her down anyway. We’ll figure something out. And…I think it’s time to bring Rogers in on this.”

“Yeah. I know.” Natasha wasn’t entirely looking forward to that conversation. She could handle Steve’s anger. She had to admit to herself though that she couldn’t handle losing Steve’s trust. It was one thing for Steve to trust her with his own life. She knew Steve well enough to know that trusting her with James’ life was a whole different thing for him, and that he wouldn’t appreciate having been kept out of the loop for so long.

Natasha set aside her food and returned to the remaining short stack of files. “Let’s finish up with these to make sure we haven’t missed anything. We can talk to Steve in the morning, they should be off the road by then in their time zone.”

* * *

 

By the time they called it a night, Natasha’s head felt not unlike the mess of files they had first encountered at Vozrozhdeniya. She had heard that sleep was supposed to be part of the brain’s clean up routine. If so, there was a lot to clean up and file away. Natasha fell asleep almost the moment her head hit the pillow, and for a while, her sleep was deep and dreamless. Eventually dreams, and then memories, flashed through her mind like a deck of cards being rapidly shuffled, until one fairly leapt out of the deck, as if her mind had offered it up: is this the card you were thinking of?

_The Red Room is happy with Natalia. Her training with the American has gone well, their missions together have been successful. They are exemplary assets of Department X. Natalia is happy too, if for different reasons. That she has the use of an apartment as part of her current cover is one of them. She has her legs wrapped around the other reason._

_Ostensibly, he is here to help her prepare for her upcoming solo mission to the American consulate in Leningrad, and to drop off the incriminating evidence she is meant to plant on a hapless attendee of the American consulate’s party. In reality, they dispensed with that business in about an hour, and are spending the remaining couple of hours before the American’s handlers get twitchy in considerably more pleasant pursuits. Like him fucking her against the wall._

_He is, damn the man, taking his time with it, holding her weight for far longer than a normal man could and thrusting in her with agonizingly slow thoroughness. She yanks his hair in retaliation, gasps out all manner of vile imprecations and desperate pleas, and eventually he lets out a breathless chuckle and speeds up, and it’s enough to send her over the edge. He follows her a few short minutes later as she lazily kisses him through his orgasm. They stay like that for a bit, kissing through the aftershocks and sharing breath. Eventually Natalia wiggles a little, impatiently, and he slides out and carries her to the bed, where they both collapse in satisfaction, clothes in disarray. As usual when they have privacy, he sprawls out to take over as much space as possible._

_“You know, it is extremely inconvenient to not have a name to call out while in the throes of passion. Are you very sure you can’t remember your name?” She’s teasing a little, but it’s an annoyance that has plagued her since they started this liaison, and even aside from that, she has never been able to shake her discomfort with his lack of a real name. She doesn’t like to think that the Red Room can take even that away._

_“You’re welcome to call out whatever name you like. And yes, I am very sure.” He’s frowning now, which wasn’t her intention. She presses an apologetic kiss to his flesh shoulder._

_“Well, you are definitely American,” they are both sure of that, by now, “and you are definitely a soldier. Perhaps I’ll ask some of the Americans at the party.” It’s a joke, mostly. The likelihood of a random selection of American diplomats knowing who one nameless American soldier is is infinitesimal._

_“Natalia, don’t.” She laughs and climbs over him to fetch her discarded underwear, but he catches her hand and tugs her to sit back down on the bed. “I’m serious, Natalia. Don’t. Neither of us can afford that.”_

_He really is serious, even a little spooked.“Don’t you want to know?” she asks him._

_He shakes his head and says, “They’ll only take it away again.”_

_Natalia had meant to leave the question of her partner’s name alone, she really had. But now she’s at the consulate, primary mission completed, and on to the secondary mission objective of finding any additional intelligence of interest to Department X, and there’s an older American man telling war stories in the library. He was at the European front during the Second World War, and he’s insisting that he met Captain America in the field, waving his glass of wine around emphatically. She should slip out of the library, take the opportunity to investigate one of the consulate’s offices. But she stays, because what if—_

_“I’m telling you, I met him, he bought me a drink! It was after we liberated Paris, in some tiny bar, all the other Commandos were there—”_

_One of the other guests scoffs. “Captain America didn’t liberate Paris!” Natalia privately agrees. They had watched one of the Captain America films in the Red Room, and Captain America had seemed like little more than convenient propaganda._

_“I didn’t say he liberated Paris all on his own, I said he was there! Look, I guarantee it, it’s gotta be in one of the history books—” He casts about the library, wine sloshing dangerously in his glass, and makes his way to one of the shelves. “I know we’ve got military history in here, let me see, let me see….Ah ha!” He pulls out a book and flips through it for a minute, before stabbing a triumphant finger at one page._

_“See! ‘In a rare moment of levity, Captain America and the Howling Commandos were photographed outside the Louvre in Paris, shortly after the city was liberated from the Nazis.’”_

_The other guests murmur appreciatively, and Natalia sneaks closer. “May I…?” she asks, and the man hands over the book absentmindedly. She doesn’t even know what she’s expecting to find, plans to maybe scan every blurry face of the soldiers in the background and periphery of the book’s photos for a glimpse of her mysterious partner, though she knows just how unlikely it is she’ll find something._

_So when she finds her Soldier’s face smiling up at her from beside Captain America, she nearly drops the book in shock. Captain America’s head is thrown back in a laugh, with her Soldier’s arm around his shoulders, and a small group of other soldiers gathered around them and caught in various states of hilarity. Her eyes fall on the caption: “From left to right: Private Gabriel Jones, Captain Steven Rogers, Sergeant James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes….”_

_James. His name is James. It could just be a man who looks like him, a relative maybe, but—no, she’s sure. She knows the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles, and this, perhaps, is the most genuine smile she has ever seen on his face. She stares in fascination: he looks thinner, face a little gaunt, and she can see that his left arm is still flesh. His nose is wrinkling up a little with the force of his smile, and Natalia thinks, with a distant sort of helplessness, that it’s adorable. Her Soldier was not just some nameless, forgotten casualty or unknown defector after all, apparently. He was one of Captain America’s famous Howling Commandos. She’s about to tear the page from the book and make a dignified run for it, secondary mission be damned, when the man who handed her the book returns._

_He hands her a glass of wine and nods towards the photo. “Now Cap was a real American hero. We could do with another like him. Young soldiers nowadays just aren’t like Cap and his Commandos.” He’s well and truly tipsy, and a rambling drunk at that. She can tell he’s going to start in on a rant about the youth of today if she doesn’t redirect him._

_“Did you meet Captain America’s men too?” She lets her eyes linger on James, and he notices._

_“Oh, is it like that? Dead for decades and still a ladykiller!” He chuckles and shakes his head. “Bucky Barnes had girls hanging off him in that bar, must’ve danced with every single one of them. Shame he was KIA, he was a real hero…” He rambles on about the war for some time, until Natalia loses patience and swiftly downs her wine._

_“That’s so interesting! Would you mind getting me another glass of wine and then telling me more?”_

_He beams genially at her and exchanges the book for her empty glass, then walks away. Once Natalia is sure no one is looking, she rips out the page with the photo of James, and slips out of the library to complete the rest of her secondary mission._

_When she returns to the apartment, the American—no, James—is waiting for her, legs stretched out on the bed and reading a book he picked up from who knows where in the dim light from the street lamps outside. He had his own mission tonight, Natalia recalls, and is due for his extraction in the morning. She’s too excited for subtlety or restraint, so Natalia fairly leaps on him as soon as she’s through the door, straddling his lap and tossing aside his book, and shoves the torn page with the photo at his face._

_“I didn’t ask any questions, it was just a stupid coincidence—look.” She leans over to turn on the lamp by the nightstand, and James hisses and pinches her hip in retaliation for ruining his night vision, but he takes the photo, and when he looks at it properly, he goes abruptly still._

_“James. Your name is James.”_

_She studies him anxiously. His eyes are wide and fixed on the photo, breath coming fast and shallow now._

_“I suppose it could be a relative, and they said this James was killed in action during the Second World War, but—”_

_“No. That’s—I know him, I think.”_

_“Well, I know your memory’s not what it should be, but I should hope you know your own face—”_

_“Not—the Captain. I know him.” James’ voice is distant, but Natalia is still riding the high of unanticipated victory._

_“Ha! So you are James! Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes!”_

_He closes his eyes tight for a moment, as if in pain. “Oh Natasha. You should have left it alone.”_

_“But—”_

_James puts the photo aside, and takes her face in his hands, the metal one cool against her flushed skin. “Thank you. You’ve let me pretend to be a person, this past year. And you, you’re—you’re just not afraid, are you? But sweetheart—”_

_The English endearment makes her heart leap when it comes from his lips and she has to kiss him for it. He pulls back and shakes his head, eyes full of that despair she had seen a hint of, that first time she saw him._

_“They’ll take it away again, like they always do. I don’t remember much, but I do remember that.”_

_Natalia had thought of that on her way back to the apartment. “Then we run.”_

* * *

 

When she woke, she indulged herself for a few minutes in a might-have-been: that they had managed to escape the Red Room; that with the return of his name to him, the rest of James’ memories had come back; that they had managed to defect to the United States and James had been reunited with what was left of his friends and family. Her fantasy petered out after that. Would it have been a white picket fence and a dog and a lot of therapy after that? Would they have been partners working for SHIELD? Would they have just made a run for it and built new lives that had nothing to do with killing or fighting?

She couldn’t quite imagine who that Natasha would have been. Less lonely, probably. She had felt very much alone after she escaped the Red Room and when she had first come to SHIELD. Less red in her ledger, maybe. Or different red in her ledger, since SHIELD then was still HYDRA after all. That Natasha wouldn’t have had so many memories taken from her, or some mystery enhancement surging through her veins.

Natasha turned it over in her head, examined the mingled guilt and regret. She could wish for that might-have-been for James’ sake, but she wasn’t sure she could for her own. All the death and destruction on her hands, all the pain, the mess in her head—it had brought her here, now. It was hers. Natasha doubted James would or could say the same. _“Oh Natasha. You should have left it alone.”_ Well, that was a conversation she could have with him, hopefully. First she had to talk to Steve.

There was more food waiting for them in the kitchen and dining room, but Natasha couldn’t stomach anything other than tea until she got this conversation with Steve out of the way. Nick sat at the table with her as she dialed Steve’s number and put him on speakerphone. Natasha would have preferred having this conversation one-on-one with Steve, but they were short on time and this was a briefing too.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Steve. You still on the road?”

“No, we’ve stopped for the night. Are you okay? Did you find something on Bucky?”

She dodged the question for the moment. “You’re on speakerphone, Nick’s here too. Can you get Sam?”

There was a tense pause from Steve before she heard him fumble with the phone. “Sure. Sam?”

“Hey Nat,” came Sam’s voice, warm enough that Natasha almost smiled.

“So we found some intel to fill in those blank spots in James’ file.”

“That’s great! ...That’s good, right?” Sam was clearly seeing something on Steve’s face because his initial enthusiasm turned to wariness, and Natasha could practically feel Steve’s tension in his silence.

“I don’t know. Is it?” asked Steve.

“Depends on how you look at it. And I’m sorry, but you’re probably going to be mad at me, Steve. For—for a lot of different things.”

“Just tell me, Natasha. You’re worrying the hell out of me.”

Natasha took a deep breath and dived in. “It’s kind of a long story. I’ll get to James, but first I have to give you some background. When you joined SHIELD, you were briefed on me, right? On the Black Widow program and the Red Room?”

“I’m guessing I didn’t get your full file, but yes.”

Natasha glanced at Nick, and he stepped in. “SHIELD didn’t know the whole story. Only two people other than Natasha and me know what she’s about to tell you: Barton and Director Carter. It was never in SHIELD’s files. We’d both like it to stay need to know only, and I hope you’ll understand why.”

“My file says I was born in 1984. That’s not true. I was born in 1964…” Natasha summarized her history as best she could, and tried to convince herself this was nothing compared to releasing the SHIELD files. It was just divulging her every last secret, no big deal.

“Well damn,” said Sam.

“What does this have to do with Bucky?” asked Steve, after a long silence.

“Odessa wasn’t the first time I ran into the Winter Soldier. I genuinely thought it was, back in DC. But they wiped me too, and I didn’t remember—I went to that Smithsonian exhibit, when I was chasing down that file for you. And I saw that little loop of video of you and James, where you’re both smiling, do you know the one I’m talking about?”

“Yeah.”

“One look at it, and I just knew, all of a sudden, exactly what James sounded like when he laughed.”

Steve made a horrible little choked noise that tore at Natasha’s heart, and she forgot that Nick and Sam were there and kept going. “I kept remembering more and more, and I couldn’t be sure it was real. The Red Room—they made a mess out of my memories. But I know he trained me in the early 80s. We were sent out on missions together. We—we got to know each other. It was probably the longest stretch he had been out of cryo in years, if ever, and I suppose they weren’t wiping him quite as much then, the Red Room never did like to do it too often. Leads to unstable operatives.”

“So when you called me, to ask me what he was like—”

“I was trying to figure out if the memories were real. You said he always saw you, that he knew you. He saw me too. Not the Black Widow, not the pretty weapon. He saw Natalia. And he was kind, as kind as he could be in the Red Room.”

“Tell me about him,” said Steve, and his voice was thick with tears. He wasn’t angry, but she couldn’t quite read his voice, and wished desperately that she could see him even though she didn’t really want him to see her. She owed him this though, a repayment of the gift he had given her when he told her about his James.

“He was quiet, and very difficult to read, unless you were looking closely. But when you did, when you spent time with him—I didn’t have much trouble reading him, when I knew what to look for. I suppose he let me see him, the man, I mean, not just the Winter Soldier. He was a good teacher, a good partner. Patient. I suppose he had to be, as a sniper. He liked his coffee black, with a ton of sugar when he could get it, which I always wondered about because I didn’t see when he could have developed a sweet tooth in Department X.” She was babbling now, and paused to gather herself.

“Yeah, that’s—that’s Bucky.”

Natasha cast about in her memory for more to tell Steve. “Um, he knew how to dance, but not why he knew. God, he had the weirdest, most grim sense of humor. They had him help teach us how to pass as Americans, and there was still so much Brooklyn in him. There wasn’t much room for feeling human in the Red Room, but—he made me feel like a person.”

Steve drew in a shaky breath and said, “You loved him.” She didn’t need to see him to know he was smiling that sad smile of his.

She echoed Steve’s own words from their last conversation back to him. “Of course. I still do, I think.”

Sam murmured something indistinct to Steve as Steve let out a watery laugh and said, “Why would you ever think I’d be mad about that? Christ, Natasha, I’m so glad. I’m so glad he had you even if it wasn’t for long. I’m glad you had each other.” That made tears spill from her eyes, and she dashed them away quickly.

“Because I was stupid and thoughtless and we got caught. I found out his name from some book at the American embassy in Leningrad. There was a party, some veteran was trying to prove a point, and he pulled out a book with a picture of you and the Commandos in it. And there was James. I ripped out the page and took it back to him, and I was so happy I had found his name for him—but James just said ‘you should have left it alone’ and that they’d just take it away from him again. And they did. They wiped us both, put him back in cryo. That’s when Lukin did…whatever he did to me.”

“Natasha, that wasn’t your fault. They would have wiped him again anyway,” said Sam.

“I could have been more careful. We could have escaped.”

“You gave him back his name, Nat. It’s not—it’s not on you that they took it away from him again.” Steve paused, to collect himself probably, and Natasha rubbed at her eyes, studiously avoiding Nick’s sympathetic gaze. “I could never be mad at you, either of you, for this.”

“I brought Tony in on the search for James.”

“Okay, now I’m kind of mad.” 

The tension broke and they all laughed a little as Nick rolled his eye and said, “That was Natasha’s call, and it was the right one. Act like a damn team, Avengers. Which, by the way, is basically what Stark said. Tony ‘I don’t play well with others’ Stark is trying to be more of a team player than you right now, Cap.”

Steve huffed a little. “Seriously though, is Tony with us on this?” His voice was tense, and Natasha could tell he was genuinely worried. Steve and Tony were friendly enough, and willing to work together, but the HYDRA thing had done a number on all of them when it came to trusting people, and Steve had reflexively closed the circle tight when it came to James.

“Yeah. He asked if it was like it was with Clint. I can’t guarantee he’ll stay with us, but we’re gonna need him, based on what we found in the Red Room files on James. I would have told you the rest anyway, but we just found this in the files and it’s the priority. So—don’t freak out.”

“You saying that just makes me more worried.”

“There’s a kill switch in his arm that’ll send enough poison to his heart to kill him if it’s activated. You need the right transmitter, and you need to be in range. It can’t be deactivated without the right protocols, otherwise it will trip the switch,” said Natasha.

“Who has the transmitter?”

“Don’t know. It was Lukin’s work. HYDRA was working the Cold War from both sides, but that doesn’t mean both sides of HYDRA liked each other. Lukin built it in the arm as a failsafe, in case the Americans started using the Winter Soldier against the Red Room. Lukin’s dead, and I know who killed him so I have some leads to follow, but—”

“Anyone could just—kill him and he wouldn’t even be able to do anything?” Yeah, when Steve put it like that, it was pretty panic-inducing. Natasha didn’t know what she would do if, after all this, they found James dead in a HYDRA base somewhere. She didn’t want to see what it would do to Steve.

Nick glanced at her before saying, “It’s unlikely it was common knowledge, otherwise someone would have wised up and used it by now. You and Wilson keep doing what you’re doing. Our best bet is to find Barnes and take him to Stark so he can figure out a fix, or at least stick him in a shielded room so we don’t have to worry about him dropping dead because some HYDRA asshole pushed a button. You two stay on the hunt for Barnes, and Natasha and I will work on running down the transmitter and deactivation protocol.”

“If you remembered all this, that means Barnes might remember too, right?” asked Sam.

“Maybe. It took a bunch of triggers, and a lot of digging for me. And there’s still a lot I don’t remember. But it’s looking a little more hopeful now, yeah.”

“Okay,” said Steve, as if to himself, and then more loudly, “Okay. Thank you, Natasha, Nick.Keep us up to date, and good luck.”

They all hung up, and Natasha let out a long, shaky breath. That had gone better than expected. Steve would probably have more questions later, but they both knew the mission came first right now.

“You did good, Natasha. Now let’s find Belova,” said Nick.

* * *

 

Tracking down Yelena wasn’t hard. In the early years after their escapes from the Red Room, Natasha had made sure she always had a general idea of where Yelena was and what she was up to, the better to avoid her. Yelena may have thought there could only be one Black Widow, but Natasha for her part didn’t much care, and figured the world was big enough for the both of them so long as they stayed out of each other’s way. As the years had passed and Yelena had mostly left her alone, Natasha had kept looser tabs on her. Still, it was the work of a day or so to tug on the right strands of the web and figure out where Yelena was now. In the meantime, Nick was looking into the circumstances of Lukin’s death for any clues on what had happened to Lukin’s research and other effects. 

Yelena, Natasha learned, was now apparently semi-retired and living in a villa in some small town near Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast. She hadn’t taken a job in years so far as Natasha could tell. Yelena dealt in secrets more than assassinations and mercenary work nowadays, variously paid to either keep her mouth shut or to divulge her intel. Hell, she was probably an off the books informant for at least half a dozen European countries’ intelligence agencies. It seemed like a cushy life all things considered, thought Natasha as she flipped through satellite imagery of Yelena’s tastefully expensive villa and the neighboring picturesque seaside town. It was probably what Natasha would be doing if she hadn’t joined SHIELD. Natasha would have been happy to leave Yelena to it, if not for needing to know what Yelena had done with Lukin’s shit.

She and Nick made their way to Dubrovnik, transportation again courtesy Stark Industries. Nick worked on following up on some sources while Natasha dived straight into surveilling Yelena. They may have been working against the clock, but rushing things would only botch them. Going in with guns blazing to punch answers out of people worked out great in the movies; in real life, it was poor tradecraft. So Natasha quelled the beat of urgency in her heart and kept to her training.

After a couple days’ worth of a slowly shrinking circle of surveillance, Natasha’s first glimpse of Yelena was something of a nasty shock. Yelena looked old. Natasha looked as long and as closely as she dared from her vantage in the cafe across from the market. She amended her initial assessment; Yelena didn’t look as old as her actual physical age, but she definitely looked older, older than Natasha certainly. Her skin was less firm, there were lines around her eyes and mouth. She looked fit, but no longer had the lithe and wiry form of a ballerina. Yelena looked forty-something, which was certainly good for someone pushing sixty, but Natasha had thought—had Lukin’s experimenting not worked on Yelena? Natasha had to quell the urge to run for the bathroom and look at herself in the mirror for any similar signs of aging. She knew she wouldn’t really find them. Natasha had looked twenty-something for decades now.

If Natasha had harbored any secret dreams that Yelena would embrace her as a long-lost sister and tell her everything she needed to know, well, that hope was fully quashed now. Natasha knew Yelena well enough to know that faced with a fellow Black Widow who still looked exactly the same as she had twenty-some years ago, her response would not be to gracefully accede the title. Her rage and jealousy would be too great for that. She supposed Yelena could have changed in the past twenty years or so. Natasha doubted it. For all that Yelena looked like the perfect, dignified prima ballerina, she had always been ferociously angry, and that anger had eventually turned against the Red Room. Natasha remembered—

_They are training with knives today, real knives rather than the rubber and wood practice knives they usually used with the trainers who taught them combat skills. They’ve all already killed with real knives already, of course. They’re eleven years old, of course they’ve used knives by now. No one looks askance at a little girl with pocket knife, not really, and small hands can do a great deal of damage with a pocket knife. But practice knives are still used the most for one-on-one training, to reduce unnecessary casualties. Natalia prefers the real knives. The trainers always look gratifyingly wary when the Widows train with real knives. As she watches the current bout though, she thinks that they will not be returning to real knives again any time soon._

_Yelena is on the mats, sparring with Anya. The fight is not going well for Anya. Poor luck for Anya to have been paired up with Yelena, but then Anya made this particular bed when she sabotaged Yelena’s last mission to take the kill for herself. It had been months ago, but all the girls in the Black Widow dormitory know that Yelena holds grudges, that she sharpens and polishes them to become the fine blade of her vengeance before going in for the kill. It’s likely to be the literal kill in this case. The matches are supposed to go to first blood, and usually that means a superficial cut, or maybe a gash that needs stitches. Yelena has carefully avoided leaving any such glancing wounds, instead toying with Anya to keep the fight going, weaving in and out of reach and shattering Anya’s nerves with close calls._

_Neither Madame nor the trainers are stepping in though. When Anya makes a desperate, ill-advised feint towards Yelena, Yelena takes the opportunity to go in low and make a swift, deep slice that opens Anya’s femoral artery. Anya cries out and manages to stagger into a lunge at Yelena, but Yelena just whirls away and lets her fall to the ground. Natalia estimates that Anya has about three minutes before she bleeds out; the pool of blood is already quite large, and Anya has lost consciousness._

_The Black Widows know better than to earn Madame’s, or Yelena’s, ire by helping Anya. A trainer moves quickly to attempt a tourniquet, but it takes four and a half minutes to get from this training room to the infirmary, and Yelena made sure to cut at an angle. Anya might as well be dead already._

_“That was unnecessary, Yelena,” says Madame, thin-lipped._

_“The matches are to first blood, aren’t they? That was first blood.”_

Natasha told Nick about Yelena when she rendezvoused with him at his hotel room the next day.

“So, she won’t talk to you. No reason she won’t talk to me though.”

“She knows I work for you.”

“She knows you _worked_ for me at SHIELD, past tense. And she trades in information nowadays, and I have plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to go to her for information. She’s not likely to kill me on sight at any rate. I’ve asked around about her, sent out some feelers.”

Natasha frowned and considered it. Nick going to Yelena was less likely to lead to immediate violence, probably. “You asking about Lukin is going to make her suspicious though. Hell, your connection to me might mean the price she asks for her intel is my head. Are you planning on just knocking on her door?”

“Come on, Natasha. I can do better than that. I broke into Tony Stark’s house for god’s sake. I’ll break in, we’ll do the usual spy bullshit and threaten each other, I’ll see if I can get any useful intel on HYDRA. Meanwhile….” Nick slid a small device across the table towards her. Natasha recognized it as a version of the gadget Tony had used to gain access to SHIELD’s systems on the helicarrier, back during the Chitauri invasion.

“Courtesy of Stark. This will get us a backdoor to all her computer systems, and you can do your magic from there. In and out, and she’ll be none the wiser, hopefully.”

“I doubt she’ll have a file helpfully called, ‘Stuff I stole from Aleksandr Lukin.’ For all we know, she’s all analog, no digital,” said Natasha, raising a wry eyebrow.

“We’ll deal with that if we don’t find any likely leads from skimming her systems, plus Stark has promised me JARVIS can do some of the heavy lifting with the searching. Let’s try the surgical strike method first. If we don’t find anything, we’ll re-assess.”

“Alright.” She tried not to think of the clock counting down on the ticking time bomb in James’ arm. 

* * *

 

Natasha set up her nest on a precarious outcropping on a hill overlooking Yelena’s villa, which required a somewhat brutal hike but offered the only position with enough plant cover to keep Natasha hidden and a clear line of sight for the laser microphone. And for Natasha’s rifle. Even if she wasn’t quite as preternaturally good a shot as James and Clint were, she could manage a decent enough shot from here to make Yelena think twice about hurting Nick if it came down to it. Once she was set up to her satisfaction, she settled into the calm of surveillance and waited for Nick to make contact with Yelena. 

This too was something she had learned from James: the simultaneous narrowing and opening of focus, eyes on the target, every other sense alive and open to her surroundings. It was easy to let time pass by like this, easy to let her mind become an empty vessel for her senses. It felt like the easiest thing she had done in a long time.

When she finally heard Yelena’s voice and Nick’s answer, Natasha only took a deep, even breath and settled her finger on the trigger of her rifle. Yelena’s tasteful sheer curtains made it difficult to read their expressions, but there was nothing alarming in their body language as Yelena joined Nick at her dining room table.

“Come for another Black Widow for your collection, Mr. Fury?”

“Would you be willing, Ms. Belova?”

Yelena scoffed. “What, join SHIELD? Or is it HYDRA? So difficult to tell, these days.”

Natasha spared a glance for the readout on the tablet set up next to her. Tony’s gadget was working on getting into Yelena’s network. Nick just had to stretch this tete-a-tete long enough for it to finish its work.

“You’re one to talk about HYDRA. The Red Room was another one of its heads, wasn’t it?”

“Is that why you’re here? Surely your pet Black Widow could give you all the information you need about that.”

“Romanoff’s intel isn’t current. I hear yours is.”

A brief silence. “Perhaps. Though if it’s the Red Room you’re after, you’re too late. That’s long dead and gone, I made sure of that. So did your Black Widow.” Yelena’s face wasn’t visible from Natasha’s vantage point right now, but Natasha didn’t have to see Yelena’s chilly smile to know it was there. Compared to Yelena, Natasha had been merciful and discreet in her dealings with the remains of the Red Room. 

“And yet, cut off one head….”

Yelena interrupted Nick, her voice sharp. “There is no more Red Room. No Department X. And as for HYDRA, I have had no dealings with them. You are wasting your time.”

“Maybe so. But you kept some souvenirs from the Red Room.”

“And?”

“HYDRA’s going to be interested in them. I need to know if you’re going to let them go to the highest bidder.” It was a simple but neat trap Nick was laying. Vague enough for plausible deniability when Yelena inevitably noticed part of her stash had been raided,and plausible enough that Yelena wouldn't immediately assume Nick or someone working for him was the culprit.

“I have no love for HYDRA.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I have no love for SHIELD either, not that there’s much of a difference between the two. I won’t give you any souvenirs I allegedly have so that you can create a new Red Room. Make do with your one pet Black Widow.” The sneer was audible in Yelena’s voice. Under any other circumstances, Natasha would be glad Yelena was keeping such a tight lid on the intel. It didn’t matter if it was just because of Yelena’s jealous self-interest so long as there was no new Red Room rising from the ashes. But Natasha needed whatever was left of Lukin’s work for James’ sake. Natasha checked on the status of the hack. Tony’s device was in, but JARVIS needed more time to pull all the data. 

“I can make it worth your while. Listen, I’m putting out fires here. I don’t care if you keep this shit forever, I just need to know whether it’s on the auction block. Last thing I need is HYDRA rebooting the Red Room, the Winter Soldier running around without a leash is bad enough.”

Natasha thought that caught Yelena’s interest. “The Soldier must be losing his edge if he didn’t manage to put you in the ground. Very well, what’s your offer?”

“Your Red Room file. The only hard copy of it left, so far as I’m aware of.” Like Natasha’s, Yelena’s file was among the documents hidden away in Vozrozhdeniya. It was a bit of a gamble using that as bait, given that there was every possibility Yelena already knew about it. “And the current location of Dr. Lukas Petrovich.” 

Well Nick certainly wasn’t fucking around. He hadn’t told her that was on the table. Petrovich was one of the only Department X scientists who had managed to defect, before the Soviet Union collapsed. Natasha hadn’t known Nick even knew where he was. Goddamn Nick Fury and his compartmentalizing.

“That’s nice, but I won’t take your word for it. Have you any proof?”

Nick had taken photos of the files they hadn’t taken with them, and he must have had current surveillance on Petrovich too. He showed some of the photos to Yelena now. Natasha couldn’t see Yelena’s expression from such a distance, but the silence sounded tense and thoughtful. She checked on the hack again: not much longer now.

“Well? Can we deal?”

“In exchange for this file and the location of Petrovich, I will guarantee that no one else will have access to any Red Room souvenirs I may or may not have.” It was a poor trade, thought Natasha. Yelena had sat on this intel for years now, it clearly wasn’t for sale. And Nick and Yelena both knew that telling Yelena about Petrovich’s was sealing his death warrant.

“And if I want the souvenirs themselves? What’s your price for that?”

“Natasha Romanoff.” Yeah, that wasn’t a surprise. “I suspect that’s not a price you’re willing to pay.”

“No, not really.” Nick was perfectly willing and able to spend an agent’s life if the need was great enough. Hell, he was spending the life of an asset like Petrovich. That was part of what being Director of SHIELD meant, and being willing to be that cost was part of what being a SHIELD agent meant. But Natasha knew her worth, and she knew Nick. Nick Fury would not spend the coin of her life on anything less than saving the goddamn world.

“Then I’ll settle for the file and Petrovich.”

“I want your word that any Red Room souvenirs stay off the market, and that if someone else comes looking for them, I’m your first call.”

“You have my word.” There was a pause as Nick studied Yelena’s face. Natasha wasn’t sure Yelena’s word was worth terribly much, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting Lukin’s files, and if Yelena actually did keep her word, then that was just an added bonus. She took the opportunity to check on the status of the hack, and let out a slow exhale of breath in relief: it was done. 

“Alright. I’ll have the file for you in three days.” Nick had a trustworthy SHIELD agent on standby to run that errand, and to clear out whatever else remained at Vozrozhdeniya. He slid a burner phone across the table to her, and stood to leave. “The only number in that phone is one you can reach me at. I’ll text you the location of the dead drop for the files, and of Petrovich, once I’m safely out of here. Pleasure doing business with you, Ms. Belova.”

Natasha covered Nick as he made his exit (complete with dramatic flapping coat, and Natasha really wondered about how much practice that required), and maintained her surveillance on Yelena until she moved out of range. When Nick gave the all clear over comms, she packed up her equipment, and made her way to their rendezvous point. Without the careful blank focus of surveillance to distract her, her doubts and fears rushed back in. What if the data they needed wasn’t in Yelena’s files? What if they were too late to help James? What if they never managed to bring James in at all? 

Fuck, but she hated being compromised on a mission. There hadn’t been time for much worrying or introspection when Loki took Clint, or during the whole Insight mess. It was probably a good thing that things weren’t literally exploding around them, but honestly, she’d take some explosions right now for the distraction value alone.

* * *

 

They rendezvoused in Belgrade, where Natasha still had an old safe house from her pre-SHIELD days. It was old enough that it wasn’t wired for any kind of internet connection, and it was pretty run down by now. It was also a part of her past that Natasha had preferred to leave in the past: this crumbling little townhouse was where Natasha—still Natalia, then—had first fled to after escaping the Red Room. It had been the pied-à-terre of some small-time arms dealer who the Red Room had sent Natalia to kill some time in the early 80s. The existence of the townhouse hadn’t been part of the Red Room’s dossier on the man, and some casual questioning before she slipped poison into his morning coffee had revealed that it had been a recent acquisition of his, made through “less than official channels, if you know what I mean, dear.” Sensing an opportunity, Natalia had appropriated it for herself against a dimly imagined future need. The Red Room had never known about it, nor the other funds and assets she had carefully siphoned off over the years.

Amid the chaos of the Yugoslav wars, the Belgrade townhouse had been as good a place as any to disappear. And that was what Natalia had done: disappeared.

There had been no joy or relief in her escape from the Red Room, only desperate need and animal impulse. Without a mission, she had been adrift, and had kept slamming against the walls of her programming, her behaviors stuck in the well-worn grooves of the Red Room’s training. And on top of that, a part of her had been frantic, certain that she had forgotten something or someone, that there was supposed to be someone else there, and of course that had been true. James was supposed to be there. The memories were still lost to her, but now the shape of the empty space suggested that this safe house had been part of her and James’ escape plan. She had only left it when word of a Department X cell in Belgrade had reached her.

Natasha shoved all that aside for now. But it was as if the safe house held the memories of her time in it better than her own mind had. The memories were there in the scuff marks in the floor from where she had dragged furniture to barricade the doors when she had been convinced the postman was a Red Room operative. They were there in the weapons still stashed in every room, which she had inventoried obsessively if she spent more than five minutes in any given room. They were there in the old shortwave radio she had listened to for hours, scouring the frequencies for a numbers station that would tell her she didn’t know what. Natasha didn’t believe in ghosts, but this place might as well have been haunted.

It helped, that Nick was here with her now. Some very small part of her was still waiting for James here, but Nick’s presence eased that anxiety a little. She still checked to see if anyone had been in the safe house recently though. Maybe James had remembered their plan…but no. The place was untouched by anything but time.

Nick didn’t comment on the safe house, and they set up their equipment and the connection to JARVIS, who had by now sifted through the data pulled from Yelena’s systems to flag the potentially relevant files. She and Nick split the files between them, and got to work. There was no helpful file that inventoried all of Yelena’s ill-gotten gains, and no explicit mention of Lukin anywhere. Finding what they needed would take more work than that.

The thing no one told you about being an international freelance spy was that it required a fair amount of work on tedious encrypted spreadsheets detailing your safe houses’ locations, your bank account numbers, your hush money and bribes to other informants, the locations of your caches of assorted weaponry and cash, the basics of your fake identities...there were a lot of moving parts to keep track of, and once built, the complicated and creaky edifice of fake identities, assets, back up plans, and back up plans for those back up plans required only occasional personal attention to stay standing. Even less in the digital era, when autopays and dead man’s switches only took a few keystrokes worth of effort to set up. The safest place to keep all of that information was in your own head of course. But a Black Widow knew that even that wasn’t safe. 

As they went through Yelena’s files, Natasha had the creeping realization that the specter of that terrible knowledge loomed large in Yelena’s life. Nick and Natasha pored through files as JARVIS decrypted them, and many of them were what Natasha expected to see: account numbers and ledgers, dossiers on rivals and allies. But JARVIS’s decryption also revealed more and more obsessively detailed logs of Yelena’s jobs and missions. If not for the intense detail of the things, Natasha would have taken them as evidence that Yelena was on someone’s payroll and these were her reports to them. But no superior would want to know or care about this level of inane detail, these tangents of free association. It was, quite frankly, some almost Memento-level fucked up shit. 

Was Yelena having memory problems? Yelena wasn’t one of the unfortunates who had been hollowed out by the chair in the course of Lukin’s experiments. In fact, Natasha didn’t remember Yelena being wiped much—she had to swallow a hysterical laugh. There she went, trusting her memories. She knew better. Yelena, obviously, knew better. Whether that was because Yelena had actual memory problems or just an intense fear of having any more memories taken from her didn’t matter. The Red Room left scars and holes, and some of them you knew about, but some of them—

_Yelena returns from a longterm undercover mission practically glowing with smugness, and flaunting her new worldliness like a gaudy ring. Her mission had been a big success, and their Red Room handlers are pleased. Natalia is unbothered, though some of the other girls simmer with jealousy. When Yelena joins her for a warm up in one of the training rooms, she offers neutral congratulations._

_Yelena accepts graciously enough and says, “Maybe they’ll stop letting you monopolize the Soldier on missions. I could have done even more with backup like him.”_

_The Soldier? Natalia doesn’t know who Yelena is talking about. “Who? I’m not monopolizing anyone.”_

_“The Winter Soldier, Natalia. The American?” Yelena’s sideways glare of annoyance shifts to concern in the face of Natalia’s honest confusion. “This isn’t funny. The Winter Soldier. You’ve been on more than a dozen missions with him. You’re his favorite, everyone knows it.”_

_“Oh,” says Natalia, a little disquieted now. She shrugs it aside. What did it matter if she forgot one of any number of interchangeable handlers and trainers and operatives? “One of my missions required calibration. They told me some memory loss was to be expected.”_

_“But it’s been nearly two years—” Yelena’s face betrays stark horror for a moment before she controls herself and turns aside to stretch._

Well. Some of the holes you didn’t know about until the ground shifted under your feet and you were falling, thought Natasha. She shook off the memory and kept looking through Yelena’s files. A few more hours of numbing analysis passed before Nick found something.

“Now why would Belova need a live video feed of a mausoleum?” He turned his laptop screen to show Natasha. The image was in grainy black and white, and only the barest shift of the foliage around the stone mausoleum indicated that it wasn’t a still image. One camera had a view of the entrance, and two others covered the other sides, and nothing interesting or noteworthy was happening on any of the angles. 

Nick frowned at the images and said, “Hope that’s not where Lukin’s body is. I’d wonder about Belova’s sanity if she felt the need to make sure Lukin won’t rise from the dead.”

“Oh no, don’t worry, Yelena made sure there wouldn’t be a body,” answered Natasha absently as she tracked down the location and history of the mystery mausoleum.

There was no obvious connection to Lukin, but anything that stood out from the expected was worth running down. And Natasha knew Yelena. Whatever she had done with Lukin’s work, she’d want to make sure she had control over it.

“Let’s see what else Yelena has eyes on,” murmured Nick. JARVIS returned results for all the video feeds Yelena maintained. Most of them were the expected security feeds surrounding her properties, plus a handful of live security feeds of easily recognizable locations of interest. Also a couple of kitten cams, to Natasha’s amusement. 

That left a dozen or so feeds with no connection to any of Yelena’s known properties, including the one of the mausoleum. Natasha could think of a few reasons for conducting remote video surveillance: intelligence gathering for an op, having eyes on dead drop locations, fishing for blackmail material. She dismissed the video feeds that obviously fit those criteria, which left half a dozen mystery feeds. JARVIS cross-referenced those as well, and after a few minutes, pinged politely for their attention and sent them the results. 

“Jackpot,” said Natasha, leaning forwards towards her screen. The mausoleum location was on a list of coordinates, some of which correlated to the surveillance locations, and digging a little more for related files...and there it was. Yelena, bless her potentially unstable mind, had kept notes on the files she recovered from Lukin. Natasha sent copies over to Nick and skimmed through them quickly.

“She was trying to figure out what Lukin did to the Black Widows, to her,” said Nick after a few minutes. 

“Yeah,” Natasha agreed. Yelena hadn’t gotten far. Natasha hadn’t either, in her own quiet quest for answers: her extremely thorough SHIELD medical testing had revealed nothing out of the ordinary. She may not have remembered what Lukin had done to her in the Red Room, but her lack of aging had become evident enough by the time she joined SHIELD looking scarcely older than she had when she first fled the Red Room. Whatever Lukin had done though, it hadn’t left any enhancements that were immediately apparent. Natasha and the other Widows were maybe a bit more resilient than standard humans, and either engineered or trained for peak physical fitness, but they weren’t supersoldiers. As for the lingering effects of the wipes...judging by the direction of Yelena’s research, Natasha was lucky to only be missing those memories affected by the wipes. 

And as for James...there was no telling what the state of his memories would be.

She’d return to Yelena’s notes later, the relevant part now was where the files themselves were kept. There was the mausoleum in France, plus a set of coordinates for a location in the Alps, another set of coordinates in Poland, an old Soviet bunker in Ukraine, the hall of records of some tiny town in Germany, and a lakeside cabin in Italy. Security through obscurity, thought Natasha, uncertain whether it was Lukin’s doing or Yelena’s own.

Nick rolled out a map and marked the locations on it. “We’ll have to split up to check all of these. Call Cap, the sooner we hit ‘em, the better.”

* * *

 

A quick conference with Steve and Sam and the plan was set: Nick and Sam would check the two relatively straightforward locations of the mausoleum and hall of records before meeting each other to check the cabin in Italy, and Natasha and Steve would head to the Alps before moving on to Poland. If —when—they found the transmitter or a way to disable the kill switch, they’d renew the search for James. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, the most efficient course of action. But Steve had insisted on checking the Alps location himself, and Natasha could guess at why. It was in the same general area as where James had fallen, all those years ago.

 _WE CANNOT LET STEVE GO THERE ALONE_ , came a frantic text from Sam as they were going over the possible division of locations. _No shit_ , sent back Natasha surreptitiously, and tried to think of a reason to go with Steve that didn’t boil down to “I’m pretty sure you’re going to lose it if this location is what I think it is.” Thankfully, she didn’t have to.

“Cap, I’m not feeling good about you taking those coordinates in the Alps alone. Those coordinates and the ones in Poland seem the most likely to be HYDRA bases, and they might be manned. You need backup,” said Nick.

Natasha jumped in before Steve could protest. “Agreed. I’ll meet Steve in the Alps. We’ll reevaluate our next steps once we’ve all checked out our assigned locations.”

 _Nice save,_ came another text from Sam as Steve grudgingly agreed to teaming up. 

“Okay, we all check in when we get to our assigned locations, and then another check in 24 hours after that, or if you get the intel we need. Do not miss your check ins.”

* * *

 

A couple of days later, Natasha set up a rendezvous with Steve in the small mountain town closest to their coordinates. From there, it would be about three days’ hike to the coordinates from Yelena’s files. Tony had offered them the use of a chopper to parachute in to the nearest safe drop site near the base, but Nick and Natasha nixed that idea, both too wary of the base still being manned. Natasha wanted the benefit of stealth, and a chopper was not stealthy. 

Steve plotted their route on his way there, and Natasha took care of the logistics during her own trip to meet him. This late in summer, there was at least little chance of inclement weather, but it was still chilly and they’d need supplies for the hike and for overnight camping. Natasha gathered the supplies from secondhand shops as she drove through Croatia and Austria, then ditched the car before she got to the Italo-Austrian border, making sure she looked the part of an adventurous twenty-something backpacker by the time she made it to the disgustingly picturesque little town nestled in the foothills of the Alps. 

She texted Steve the details of their cover and rendezvous location, and stressed that he could not look like his usual clean-cut GI-in-civvies self. _Don’t worry about it_ , he texted back, which only filled Natasha with foreboding. Undercover was not Steve’s strong suit. But when she met him at the town’s tiny train station, she was pleasantly surprised. His pack looked well-used, his clothes and boots worn in, and best of all, he had a beard. The glasses and baseball cap look worked okay in the short term, but it barely did anything to truly disguise Steve’s rather famous face from anyone who was really looking. The beard made him a lot less recognizable.

Natasha moved to greet Steve with a hug and a couple of Continental kisses on the cheek, which were meant to uphold their cover as two reunited backpacker friends. _Fuck the cover_ , she thought as soon as she saw Steve’s face. He dropped his pack to the ground and met her halfway for a rather more desperate hug than their cover called for. Natasha didn’t care though. As his arms came around her, the part of her that was still wound tight with the fear that Steve was upset with her about James finally unwound. There was no lie in the way he held her close, or in the way he tucked his head in towards her neck a little, as if he was still skinny and small Steve Rogers. Natasha clenched Steve’s leather jacket in her fists and breathed him in until he pulled away, and then lifted a hand to brush teasingly at his new beard as he gave her one of his sad smiles.

“You grew this in just a few days? I’m impressed.”

That earned her the usual ‘you’re not as funny as you think you are’ look and Steve said, “The Serum’s not that miraculous. I’ve had it for a while now.” Natasha would have words with Sam about not mentioning Steve’s new look.

“C’mon, we’ve got a room in this town’s only hostel. We can take the rest of the day to finish planning and set out at first light tomorrow.”

Steve was quiet for most of their walk to the hostel, so Natasha filled the silence with empty chatter about the town and the sights nearby. It really was a gorgeous area, even in the off season when there wasn’t enough snow for the skiers who flocked to the Alps in the winter months. The valleys were lush and green, and dotted with wildflowers, and it was all very _The Sound of Music_. It almost didn’t feel real. It was the crisp chill in the air, like the memory of ice, that reminded her of their purpose here. She could tell none of the natural beauty was making any impression on Steve. Steve wasn’t seeing any of it, he was too caught up in his head, and in the mission. Then she had an abrupt realization.

“You probably shouldn’t have taken the train here, huh.”

“Probably not,” he agreed. They walked in silence for a few moments, and then Steve tried to put a brave face on it. “It was fine. I just—couldn’t look out the train windows.” _Oh, Steve._ Natasha linked arms with him, and they walked the rest of the way to the hostel in silence.

This town wasn’t on any of the more popular inn-to-inn hiking trails, so the hostel was far from full, and they had a room to themselves. Steve spread a map out on a free bed to show her their planned route. He had plotted it meticulously, with two alternate routes in case they ran into any obstacles, plus his preferred campsites. He had a copy of the map for her, but Natasha committed it to memory anyway. 

“I asked Stark if anything shows up in the satellite imagery, any indication of a base or bunker, but there’s nothing visible from the air.” He folded out the map more and tapped at a location deep in the Alps. “This is about where Bucky—fell. If there was water flowing in the river at the bottom of this ravine…” Then it was conceivable that James had been carried along by the current until he could be found by anyone working out of a base at the coordinates they were checking in the valley. The war’s Eastern Front wasn’t so far away, and it was especially porous when it came to the ties between HYDRA and the precursor to the Red Room. Zola would have known that, and Zola would have had people looking for James.

She said as much, and Steve nodded, jaw tight with anger. “It all seems real simple and obvious, when you lay it out like that.”

“You’re not fucking omniscient, Steve. There’s no way you could’ve known any of this then, and if this is just one long exercise in self-flagellation for you—” That was probably a low blow, but Natasha needed Steve to have his head in the game. They didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in guilt.

“No! That’s not—” He stopped and visibly reigned his temper in. “I wanted to check this location because I thought—if there’s anywhere that has the earliest files on Bucky, it’d be here. They’d have started here.” Steve’s face was a picture of mingled misery and resolve as he stared at the map. _James, could you not have thrown us a bone here? Left Steve a note or something? I cannot deal with Steve’s stupid sad face._  

She laid a hand over his, and he turned his hand to grasp hers, tight enough to hurt. “We’ll get the files, and we’ll get him, and he’ll be okay, Steve.” Agent Romanoff would never make such a promise on a mission, and Natalia the Black Widow had never been one for platitudes. James could be dead already, for all they knew. But Natasha—the Natasha who was Steve’s friend, she wanted to lift some of the misery from the set of his shoulders. She wanted to give him something to hold onto. 

“I’m not as strong as you are, Natasha. If he’s—I can’t lose him again.” Steve kept his eyes on their linked hands as he said it. Natasha believed him. Practice didn’t make perfect when it came to grief. And hope could be as much a weapon as it could be a balm.

“You won’t. _We_ won’t.”

* * *

 

With the route settled, Natasha and Steve turned their attention to checking and prepping their supplies and weapons. They divvied up the camping supplies between them, Steve putting his pack together with absent-minded ease. He looked askance at some of the things Natasha deemed necessary for a wilderness mission, but Natasha ignored him. Steve could get so Grandpa Rogers about how “back in the war, we trekked forty miles through the snow with nothing but one blanket and no LED lights or camp stoves or blah blah blah…” Natasha headed that off at the pass by asking after Sam. Then Steve asked about how Clint was doing, and they traded updates on friends and colleagues until their packs were ready for the next day’s hike.

The easy conversation loosened Steve up some, to Natasha’s relief. It was easy to not notice, given that Steve was polite and courteous to strangers and acquaintances, all business on the job, and a dry smart ass with his friends, but Steve actually wasn’t all that easy to talk to. On a professional level, Natasha admired it: Steve could say a lot and it was only later that you’d realize he’d said very little of actual significance. On a personal level, it was pretty frustrating. Which was probably the pot calling the kettle black. Well, Natasha was _trying,_ okay?  

Steve was too, apparently, because after a lull in the conversation, he ducked his head and asked, “Y’know I’ve always wondered, why Natasha? I mean, I know it’s a nickname, and you don’t have to say—”

“No, it’s fine. We use a lot of nicknames, in Russian. And you know, I was Natalia in the Red Room, so I wanted a change—”

_Natalia eyes the ludicrously opulent bed of their mark speculatively. She and the American had broken in to the high-security mansion with relative ease, only to find that their mark, scheduled to arrive that evening, had been delayed at the airport. It’s left them at loose ends. They have hours left to wait until the mark and his entourage arrive, and she and her partner have already tossed the house for any intelligence._

_The American is looking out the window, alert for signs of anyone approaching. Natalia jumps on the bed. It’s obscenely soft, piled high with useless little decorative pillows that fall to the floor as Natalia moves on the bed. Their mark probably deserves death for being able to sleep on something like this every night, Natalia decides, thinking of her own hard cot in the Red Room dormitories._

_“We’ll hear anyone coming, that gravel drive is far from silent. Come here, try this bed, it’s ridiculous.”_

_He rolls his eyes at her, but joins her anyway. As soon as he gets on the bed, his eyes widen. “Okay, this guy absolutely deserves to die for getting to sleep on this bed every night.” His words come out in English, which happens sometimes, when she and the American are alone together._

_Natalia beams at him. “That’s exactly what I thought!” The American laughs at her delight and pulls her in for a kiss. She can feel his smile against her mouth, and matches it with her own. They don’t usually have time or occasion for a leisurely exchange of kisses. Natalia, for her part, is rather goal-oriented, and will take her Soldier any way she can have him, foreplay or no foreplay. They don’t have so many opportunities that she can afford to be picky. But he likes to kiss and touch, when given the chance._

_They have the chance now, and they let themselves sink into the absurdly soft bed, curled on their sides facing each other. His mouth is hot and teasing on hers, then like a brand when he presses a kiss to that one sensitive spot just behind her ear, on her neck. She tips her head back in mute encouragement to give him better access, before directing her own attention to pressing soft kisses to the sharp points of his cheekbones, his nose, the dimple on his chin. He pulls back to give her one of his intense looks, the more heated version of the look he gives to targets through scopes. It’s the look that, as ever, convinces her that he really sees her. The world shrinks to their shared breath and their eyes on each other, and Natalia hopes that he feels just as seen, just as known, as she does. She feels full of a vast, wondering tenderness._

_She thinks he sees it, he must, because his breath catches and he says, “Natasha, I—”_

_The affectionate diminutive lights her up with the force of a lightning strike at night. She hears nicknames trip easily off the tongues of others, the Russian language is endlessly creative with them, but they are not tolerated in the Red Room. Too much familiarity. Too much humanity._

_“Say it again.”_

_“Natasha? Or would you prefer Natashenka, or maybe Talia—” She rolls on top of him and pulls her name from him with breathless kisses._

_Over twenty years later, Natalia Alianovna Romanova stands in front of Nick Fury, ready to start a new life._

_“We can set you up with a new name, if you’d like,” he offers._

_A new name for a new life. “Natasha,” she says, and doesn’t know why. “Natasha Romanoff.”_

“Natasha? You okay? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked, you don’t need to tell me—”

“No, it’s fine, I just—it’s just that I remembered something.” She didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or cry. “James was the first one to call me Natasha, I think. The Red Room frowned on nicknames, and I thought—” She had justified it to herself as a silly little rebellion, a way to trick herself into familiarity in a new life. But no, her name was the echo of a lost and beloved memory, a reminder unattached to a remembrance, until now. 

Steve looked stricken when she turned to him, and he let out a strangled little sound that could only charitably be called a laugh. 

“Yeah, he does that. Nicknames people he cares about. He was the first one to ever call me Stevie.” Steve’s voice broke, and he stopped to clear his throat. “Didn’t much call me that when we got older, I told him we weren’t kids any more. No one’s called me that since—anyway, I’ve missed it, since I woke up here. Couldn’t stand anyone other than Bucky calling me that though.”

“What a fine pair we make, getting emotional over nicknames.” They both knew it was more than that they were getting emotional over. _I swear he took half of me with him_ , Steve had said of James’ fall, and Natasha saw the truth of it now. James Barnes had a larger piece of her than she had ever reckoned too. If they came together, her and Steve and James, maybe they’d all make something like a convincing whole.

“Bucky’d laugh at us and call us a couple of saps,” said Steve, and then, after a long silence, “We should get to bed. Early start tomorrow morning.”

* * *

 

They left at first light. The first part of their hike followed established trails, which gave a chance for the beauty of their surroundings to finally make an impression on Steve. It was tough to be miserable when you were trekking through fields of wildflowers under a perfectly blue sky. Natasha herself was not unmoved by all the natural beauty either. This was never going to be the kind of thing she liked doing for fun—too many echoes of wilderness survival training in the Red Room—but as far as missions went, the verdant foothills and snow-tipped crags of the Alps made for a pretty nice background. 

On their first day, they ran into a handful of other hikers who cheerfully shared news of conditions further down the trail and of the amenities of the nearest hiking hut. Steve and Natasha would not be availing themselves of those amenities. It would be a tent and sleeping bags for them. They thanked the hikers anyway, and continued on. The conversation with the hikers was probably the most Steve had talked all day. He was never any more chatty than he had to be on missions, but she had hoped…. She pushed aside the disappointment. It wasn’t exactly the time for a heart-to-heart, and the anxiety and uncertainty about James were hanging too heavy over them both.

Plus, Steve set a pace just short of relentless, and that only in deference to Natasha’s non-super soldier state. They weren’t gaining a lot of altitude at least. Their target coordinates were tucked in the foothills of the mountains, so while the terrain would get rougher the closer they got, it was far from an Everest climb. Still, it wasn’t conducive to conversing about anything that wasn’t mission-critical. 

By the time they made camp just after sunset, Natasha was sore and exhausted, and not in the mood to push for any conversation that didn’t revolve around dinner or setting up their tent. Steve looked like he might say something a couple of times, getting that little forehead wrinkle between his eyes, but stayed silent. After they set up camp and ate a fast dinner heated over the fire, Natasha headed to the single tent to sleep while Steve kept watch. They switched off four hours later, and broke camp at dawn, pressing on to their destination. They were off the established trail now.

The second day’s trek was more grueling without a marked trail to rely on. Navigating the terrain and staying on course required their full attention. The green rolling hills had given way to rocky ridges and scrubby grass and pines, and the mountain chill became more pronounced. By afternoon, they had reached the valley and its icy glacier-fed river that they would follow until they reached their target.

Steve pulled out the map when they stopped to make camp that night. “We should reach the target coordinates tomorrow afternoon if we can keep making such good time.”

Natasha winced as she pulled off her boots to massage her aching feet. Their pace was getting to her, and she had first watch tonight. Steve eyed her, a flash of guilt crossing his face. “You good to keep up this pace?”

She didn’t say that this pace wasn’t so far off from the pace James had set, when the Red Room sent her out with him for training in the wilderness and forests. She didn’t say that it was a cakewalk compared to the time the Red Room ran their own personal hunger games, setting the Black Widows loose into the taiga to see which of them could make it. “I’m good,” she said instead, and turned her attention to brewing some sludgy coffee over their small campfire.

Steve walked over the fire to warm his hands and snorted a little as he peered at her coffee. “That even a liquid? Geez, you make it thick as mud like Bucky—” Steve cut himself off.

Natasha ducked her head to smell the coffee and avoid looking at Steve. The bare shape of a memory formed in response to the aroma of the coffee, more negative space where a memory should be than anything else. “I don’t remember who taught me. Maybe it was James.” 

She poured the coffee into her thermos and took a scalding sip. It really did taste awful, Clint had always made fun of her for it, but she’d stubbornly made it the same way every time. Her lips burned with more than just the heat of the coffee. She had tasted this, more than once, on someone else’s—

“I meant it, y’know. I’m glad you had each other. No matter what else happens,” said Steve, voice strong and certain over the crackle of the campfire. He paused for a moment, then bent down to press a kiss to her forehead. “Good night, Natasha.” Maybe she was imagining it, but she thought he said her name differently now, now that he knew just who it was who had named her.

“Good night.” Her chest felt tight with some unnameable mess of emotion. She breathed through it as best she could.

Following the river made navigation for the next day’s hike easier, but that was the only thing that was easy. The terrain was rarely flat, and they were gaining some altitude in fits and starts as they scrabbled over rocky, steep hills. They were occasionally enveloped by an icy fog that made them just damp enough to be uncomfortable, and turned the rocks treacherously slippery. Both Natasha and Steve took a couple of tumbles when they slipped on rocks that gave way under their feet. On top of that, the pine forest grew denser the further into the narrow, deep valley they got, hemmed in by the mountains surrounding them. HYDRA must have had an easier route in, thought Natasha, but she and Steve had scoured the satellite and topographic maps, and they’d found nothing. Either they’d always come in by air, or their route had grown over or been overtaken by a rockslide or shift in the river.

By the time they reached the coordinates, it was late afternoon and they were dirty, damp, and bruised. So when they were met by the roar of the river they had been following, its fast, frothing flow blocking them from a rusted over metal door set in the mountain on the other side of the river, Natasha half wanted to chuck herself in the river out of sheer frustration. She didn’t, of course, and instead examined their surroundings with Steve. 

As best as they could tell, the river didn’t use to be so wide. Natasha used a scope to get a closer look at the door, and confirmed the suspicion. There were the remnants of a bridge foundation just barely visible.

“Ugh, global warming. The glaciers and snowpack are melting way more than they did back in your day. This river’s bigger than it was when HYDRA built this base.”

“We’ll find a way across,” said Steve, making that Captain America face of clenched jaw determination. “Call and make our check in, I’m gonna look around.” He set his larger pack down, and pulled his shield off the harness where it had been hidden under the pack.

The sat phone got a weak signal, but it was enough to make a crackly, static-laden check-in call to Fury, and then a back up check-in call to Stark. Once that was done, Natasha dumped her pack on the ground and took a seat while she glared at the stupid river and picked pine needles out of her hair.

“I could maybe swim across the river!” called out Steve’s voice.

Natasha eyed the rushing water. She craned her neck to look downriver. There were a lot of pointy rocks and boulders. “No. And what is it with you and tossing yourself into large bodies of water?” She was pretty sure Steve would just drown if he tried to swim this river, and James wasn’t here to drag him out.

Steve was silent for a few minutes, but Natasha could hear him moving around. She dug into her pack for a protein bar. The flavor was disgusting, for which she only had herself to blame.

“I think I’ve got it!” came Steve’s voice, from a somewhat unexpected direction. Natasha peered up into the trees, where Steve clung rather precariously to a pine tree some twenty feet up. “We can rig a line from this tree, to one of the trees across the river, then use the rope to get across!”

Natasha judged the distance. They did have enough rope for it. The issue was how to secure the rope to a tree across the river. Clint’s grappling hook arrows would have come in handy now. Or Sam’s wings. Dammit. 

“Yeah, but how are we gonna get the rope across?”

“Tie it around the shield of course!” Natasha frowned, trying to imagine it. “Did something like it back in the war, it’ll work, I swear!” Natasha had visions of Steve’s priceless vibranium shield floating down the river. Admittedly, she’d seen him do crazier stuff with it. “Listen, the other option is I throw you across, so—”

“Let’s leave that for Plan B. Come back down, the rope is down here.” 

Steve dropped down with a thump and jogged back over as Natasha pulled out their rope. They got the rope tied around the shield, and Steve did a few practice throws to get a sense of how the shield would fly with the added rope. Natasha, like all the other members of the Avengers, could toss the shield in a pinch. It was basically a giant metal frisbee after all. But no one else could get the shield to do the same crazy ricochets and trick throws. If anyone could get this to work, it was Steve.

As Steve scoped out the trees across the river for a likely target, Natasha moved closer to the river, the better to grab for the shield if it fell. Steve, having picked his tree, swung his arm in a few practice arcs, and then threw the shield with no warning. It swung out wide, rope trailing behind it, but whatever crazy shield geometry Steve had mastered ensured that the shield’s course ended in a tight arc that wrapped the rope around a sturdy looking pine and wedged the shield in a y-shaped junction of branches. Steve took the end of the rope still on their side and climbed up a tree to tie it securely. The rope stretched taut some 15 feet over the river, and held up to Steve’s testing tugs.

“You should go across first, you’re lighter. I can fish you out of the river easier than you could me.”

“So reassuring,” said Natasha, and prepared to go across anyway. She strapped on what supplies and tools she thought they might need on the other side, and then Steve gave her a boost up to the rope. Natasha could probably tightrope walk her way across (thanks, Red Room acrobatics training), but she settled for the safer alternative of swinging her legs up around the rope and pulling herself across with her arms. Her arms were burning fiercely with the effort by the time she got to the other side, but the rope had held. 

Safely on the other side of the river, she scrambled up the tree Steve’s shield was lodged in to disentangle it and the rope, and secured the rope properly for Steve to make his way across. Steve, super soldier show off that he was, got across the river in half the time Natasha had.

“Told you it’d work!” said Steve as he dropped to the ground in front of her flashing that stupid “I’m Captain America!” grin. The bastard wasn’t even out of breath. 

Steve was impatient now, so close to their target, and he jogged over the large rusty door, brushing aside the overgrowth of plants and rust. It was hours until sunset yet, but twilight was falling this deep in the valley now, and Natasha had to click her flashlight on to examine the door.

“During the war, we found a couple HYDRA bases like this, hidden away deep in the forest, or in the mountains.” Steve ran his hands along the door, expression distant. “HYDRA never bothered with fancy locks for ‘em, they were too rushed and underfunded for that by that point of the war. I’ll bet this one is the same...” 

Steve’s hands found the lock and handle, hidden behind a layer of rust. He stepped back, lifted his shield, and struck at it, once, twice. The lock gave, and Steve grabbed at the handle to start dragging it open. Natasha pulled out her sidearm to cover the slowly opening door, just in case. Steve was really straining to open the door, which was built as thick and solid as a vault door. There must have been some electric mechanism or something that had helped this monstrosity open when it was an active base, but with no power, opening it manually was the only way to go. She was glad Steve was here, no way could she have got it open without blowing the thing.

With one last screeching groan, Steve got the door open enough for them to squeeze comfortably through. Stale, rusty smelling air seeped out, reminding Natasha uncomfortably of blood. Steve clicked his own flashlight on, and they walked slowly into the dark. 

Natasha let Steve take the lead, in deference to his greater experience with HYDRA bases, and he did move through the place with a confidence born of familiarity. “These places all had a similar layout,” he muttered, as they moved past empty offices and supply rooms and armories. The labs and records rooms were always deeper in, according to Steve.

Judging by the state of the base, this place had been slowly shut down but not wholly abandoned, likely as the route to get to it grew less and less accessible thanks to the river. There were still supplies and weapons in the storage rooms, while the offices and living quarters showed signs of having been cleared out. They should probably blow the place once they got what they needed, prevent HYDRA from ever using this base again. 

Steve stopped in his tracks when they got to the first medical lab. Natasha swept the room with her flashlight, and found nothing but equipment neatly covered with dust sheets. 

“No records here, c’mon.” She could guess at the direction of Steve’s thoughts, and she was not inclined to indulge them. He could brood about James on his own time.

They were getting deep into the mountain now, and Natasha wanted to make a tasteless joke about the mines of Moria and a balrog, because she was pretty sure Steve had seen the Lord of the Rings movies by now, but the base was honestly unsettling. The weight of the silence and the dark and the awareness of James’ suffering in this place…Natasha would be glad to be under the open sky again.

A few empty rooms later, they found the calibration room. It was Natasha who stopped in her tracks then, a couple of steps behind Steve, an old terror flooding through her as soon as her flashlight illuminated the chair, that _fucking_ chair. The sight and physical proximity of it tossed her back to those awful, endless moments she had been forced to watch James shaking and screaming in it, to her own small eternity in it. She wanted to hate it enough to be able to do something, to shoot it to pieces, to walk out the door and out of this base and blow the whole fucking mountain, anything, but she couldn’t. She was too fucking scared of the thing, even now.

Steve saw the tremor in her flashlight’s beam and he heard the panicked pace of her breath. And then he saw the chair. He had read James’ file. He knew what it was. He circled the thing once, then with deceptive casualness, took the shield from its harness on his back, and slammed it edge on into the chair. Again and again, the metal clanging and shrieking, Steve struck the machinery of the chair. His own breath was coming hard now. Sweat, or maybe tears, gleamed on his face in the flashlight’s glow.

Natasha took a few halting steps forward towards Steve and the ruin of the chair. Steve stopped, took one look at her, and silently offered her the shield. The fear was still alive in her, but it was joined now—overcome by—rage. She steadied her hands and exchanged her flashlight for the shield. Natasha hefted the shield and stepped forward into the circle of light. She wasn’t as strong as Steve, but the shield’s edges were sharp, and nothing stood up against vibranium for long. By the time she was done, the chair was a heap of sheared and twisted metal. She wanted to burn the remnants, but they still had work to do. She tossed the shield back to Steve, and he tossed her the flashlight, and they left the calibration room without looking back.

Finding the stupid records room felt like something of an anticlimax after that. It was just a long, low-ceilinged room of row after row of carefully tagged lock boxes and filing cabinets, because fucking Nazis and their bureaucracy and attention to meticulously documenting their evil science. It didn’t take long to find the box labelled Winter Soldier Project in Cyrillic. Natasha picked the lock and rifled through its contents, skimming past the usual horrors until….

“Jackpot,” she murmured. A whole thick file on James’ prosthetic arm, with reports and schematics and memos. She flipped through quickly, checking the dates; the latest date was in 1969, and then there was a note: SUBJECT TRANSFERRED TO BOCHNIA, and a ticket indicating that the file had been copied and sent on ahead to Bochnia. Their next coordinates to check were there too; Bochnia was a smallish city in Poland, whose main claim to fame was its salt mine, one of the oldest in Europe. HYDRA did love its underground lairs. Natasha called Steve over to show him.

“Yeah, that sounds like HYDRA’s style, having a base in a salt mine. Y’know, there was this one castle we stormed—never mind, it’s not relevant right now. This all we need?”

“Yeah, grab the whole box, and let’s get out of here.”

The left the base at a jog, emerging back into the forest to the darkness of early evening. Natasha took a deep breath of the chilly air, and let the living scent of the river and pines draw her out of the close darkness of the base they had just left behind. She felt, finally, as if they were getting closer to James. She felt as if she could afford to hope.

* * *

 

They crossed the river again, and set up camp for the night on a clear patch of ground. While Steve set up the tent, Natasha made their check-in calls. Nick reported that he was on his way to meet Sam in Italy. He and Sam hadn’t found anything new on James, but they did have promising new leads on HYDRA bases. Natasha also put in a check-in call to Tony. They’d need to get Tony the intel on James’ arm as soon as possible, and work out a fast extraction for her and Steve. 

Tony was disconcertingly quiet as she gave him her status update, and she wished she could see him, see if he was holding himself with the stillness or rigidity that always betrayed his anger or pain. She only had his voice to go on though, and he was all business as they worked out the logistics of a chopper extraction for her and Steve, how to get the newest files to Tony, their transport to Bochnia. 

She was about to say her thanks and hang up when Tony said, “So. I looked at the Winter Soldier file Fury sent me. Were you gonna mention that he probably killed my parents?”

Natasha winced. She’d wondered if he’d catch that. It wasn’t explicit in any of the files they had, but if you read between the lines, it was a reasonable conclusion. HYDRA had definitely been behind the Starks’ deaths, with an able assist from Obadiah Stane. “Not without confirmation. I understand if—”

He made a dismissive noise. “C’mon, I read the file. This is like Barton’s Loki meat puppet deal, only a thousand times worse. I may have indulged in a little righteous anger, but Pepper and Bruce made some very good points against killing Cap’s assassin BFF. And uh, I know a little something about waking up with unwelcome body modifications. We’re good. I reserve the right to blast him if he’s still a mindless murder machine, but—we’re good.”

“Thank you.” Tony’s kindnesses were often prickly and sharp-edged, but she appreciated them all the same. “I’ll send you the locations of some HYDRA bases to blow up.”

“Awww, you really do love me! What’s your skin in the game, anyway? You’re not just doing this for Cap and because murder popsicle here trained you in the dear old mother country.”

“Now that’s not your business,” she chided gently, and hung up. Give Stark an inch, and he’d take a mile. And if things worked out for the best, as she hoped they would, he’d find out anyway.

* * *

 

They hiked out to their extraction point the next morning. It took them about six hours of hard hiking to get to the clearing, where they were met by the chopper Tony sent. The chopper got them to the nearest airfield, and from there they took a plane to Bochnia, where, because Tony thought he was clever, they had reservations under the names Mr. and Mrs. Peel at the resort attached to the salt mine. Natasha was not going to explain that reference to Steve. 

“A…health resort? At an old salt mine?” asked Steve, as they waited in line to check in. He peered over Natasha’s shoulder at the somewhat poorly translated pamphlet she was reading.

“Climate’s good for respiratory disorders and allergies, apparently.”

Steve frowned and rubbed at his chest absently. “Coulda used that in ‘39.” 

They checked in under the aliases provided by Tony, went up to their room to drop off their gear, and then explored the resort and the open parts of the mine. The chambers and passages of the mine were now home to little chapels, galleries, exhibits on the history of the mine, even an underground train and an underground lake; the largest publicly accessible chamber of the mine was huge, and home to the resort’s medical and rehabilitation facilities. Steve’s jaw went tight at the sight of the kids in the playgrounds, and even tighter when he saw the patients. Natasha was none too pleased either. If this whole place was on top of a HYDRA base…

“How far off are we from the coordinates?” murmured Steve, eyes roaming the high ceilings as their tour guide exhorted the health benefits of the mine’s microclimate.

In answer, Natasha tilted her phone so that Steve could see the map on its screen. The coordinates were for the empty field behind the aboveground hotel, and none of the available underground routes took them under the field. But there were plenty of old closed off passages in the mine, and seven whole levels of the underground workings that were supposedly closed and filled in. Who knew how many or which of the passages were actually unnavigable due to tunnel collapses or structural instability, or if those seven lower levels had ever even been filled in.

“We’re gonna have to do some more exploring,” said Natasha. 

They went back up to their room and hammered out a plan over a room service dinner. If this was a normal op, Natasha would have spent days casing the place, would have had intel from analysts and access to surveillance records and dossiers on all the employees. They had neither the time nor the resources for all of that right now. So basically, they’d just poke around until they found something. 

It took two nights of cat burglar style lurking around, and two days of restorative therapies for their nonexistent allergies and breathing problems while they made like Nancy Drew and snooped around asking questions. On the third night, they got lucky when Steve spotted someone else lurking around the mine shafts at night and followed them to the entrance to HYDRA’s secret lair. Said entrance was, naturally, an elevator.

“Another elevator?” said Natasha when Steve told her over comms. “There better not be another computer Zola down there.”

“Hope not. We gotta gear up.” They had been making their night-time explorations in mostly civilian clothes, for plausible deniability in case they were caught. “Meet you back at the room, and then we’ll see what’s down there. I’ll call it in to Fury and Stark.”

When she got back to their room, Steve was already suiting up, strapping on a thigh holster and then his utility belt. In deference to Steve’s sensibilities (which, to Natasha’s amusement, had already been stretched to their gentlemanly limit with their sharing a hotel room and a bed, because “it’s just different from sharing a tent, Natasha, okay?”), Natasha suited up in the bathroom. She pulled on the Black Widow catsuit, her Widow’s bites, her utility belt with the hourglass buckle, the holsters for her knives and guns. The matte black of her uniform made her reflection look like a void against the fluorescent brightness of the bathroom. She met her reflection’s eyes, and asked herself, _who do you need me to be_? 

The answer came easily: she needed to be the Black Widow, and she needed to be Agent Romanoff, formerly of SHIELD. She needed to be Natalia Alianovna Romanova of Russia and the Red Room, and she needed to be Natasha Romanoff, of the Avengers and America. She needed to be Steve’s teammate, and James’ partner. She needed to hold all of those things together in a coherent whole. She needed to be herself. She thought she could, now. She hoped so, anyway. 

* * *

 

They slipped silently through the hotel’s empty hallways and wound their way through the mine’s passages and corridors, Steve in the lead, until they reached the secret elevator, tucked away in a passageway cordoned off with warning signs and dire mine collapse pictograms. It was locked with the same kind of mechanism as the elevator at Lehigh had been, and was as easy to hack with Natasha’s phone as that one had been. They got in, and the elevator automatically went down. And down. And down. Even Steve began to look a little disconcerted by the time the elevator finally slowed to a stop. They were very far down, probably at the deepest level of the old mine. As the doors opened, Steve had his shield at the ready, while Natasha covered him with her Widow’s bites.

They were met by a hapless baffled HYDRA minion who froze as he spotted them, too surprised to go for a weapon. Natasha smiled at him. He blanched and moved to bolt, but Steve got there first, neatly disarming and restraining him.

“Aleksandr Lukin worked on the Winter Soldier in this facility. Where?”

The minion bucked and struggled in Steve’s grip, letting out a strangled “hail HYDRA!” and Natasha moved to immobilize his mouth before he could bite down on his cyanide capsule, but she was too late. Steve dropped his seizing body in disgust and turned his attention to checking the passage for any more hostiles. Natasha patted the dead HYDRA minion down for anything of potential use.

“He wouldn’t happen to have a map of the place on him, would he?”

Natasha fished around in the guy’s pockets. A pen, a cell phone (no signal, obviously), a money clip, some mints… 

“No map, but he does have an access card,” answered Natasha, brandishing the card. “Where to, Cap? Right or left?” 

Steve cocked his head, listening for anybody else approaching. “Let’s try right.”

The moved down the passage, checking the locked rooms as they went. This base was a lot more modern than the one in the Alps, with each room access locked and the whole place humming with the buzz of fluorescent lighting and electronics. The excess of medical and scientific equipment everywhere suggested this was more of a research facility than anything else. Natasha felt more and more certain that Lukin must have done some of his work here.

Likely thanks to the late hour, they only ran into a handful of isolated HYDRA guards and scientists as they went along checking rooms, and they dispatched them easily enough. You’d think HYDRA minions would be at least somewhat prepared for the sight of Captain America’s shield headed towards their faces at great velocity, it being an unavoidable job hazard and all, but they all had expressions of total shock every time they were faced with it. 

They’d cleared half a dozen nondescript labs and offices by the time someone finally caught on that the base had been breached and the alarm sounded, and by then it was too late. They had already reached the base’s ops room, which was located behind a set of thick double doors in a long, echoing chamber that dwarfed HYDRA’s computers and equipment, and which was staffed by a paltry three techs squinting at computer screens, plus a half dozen guards who they interrupted in the middle of a card game. Clearly, this facility was not used to seeing a lot of action. Which, fair enough, it _was_ deep in the bowels of the earth and all. Steve took out half the guards with a throw of his shield, and launched himself at the rest of them, while Natasha handled the techs. Bless them, they were already shaking in their boots, hands up and babbling in Polish.

One of the techs made the unfortunately brave decision to reach for a weapon, and got a widow sting to the face for his trouble. Natasha didn’t have the luxury of a subtle or lengthy interrogation here.

“Anyone else wanna try that?” she asked, as she disabled the base’s security protocols. The two remaining techs shook their heads. “Good. If you answer me, you live. If not, you’re of no use to me and you don’t. Aleksandr Lukin used to work on the Winter Soldier project at this facility. Where? Where are the records of it?”

The techs talked over each other in their haste to answer her. “I—I don’t know, I never—”

“Lukin? I don’t know a Lukin—”

“The Winter Soldier project. Where in this facility was it based?”

Steve came to join her, bringing one of Tony’s USB digital lock pick gadgets with him. He plugged it into the most likely port on one of the computers of the ops room’s control panel. Tony and JARVIS could pull all the electronic data for later analysis. The techs turned newly terrified eyes to Steve, but one of them summoned up some defiance in the face of Captain America.

“I will tell you nothing! Hail HYDRA!” Natasha brought a knife to his throat, close enough for a line of blood to show. The tech shook under her blade, but he snarled at her and stayed silent. 

It was the other tech who broke as Steve loomed over him. Steve, Natasha had learned in the course of working with him, was not particularly skilled at interrogation. He didn’t have the knack for that sort of manipulation. What he did have a knack for was looking coldly furious and disapproving, and something about how his face and body turned into all harsh lines of judgment induced some of the more pathetic members of the criminal element to do embarrassing things like burst into tears or spontaneously confess. The other tech broke now under the force of Steve’s glare.

“The—the old records are in Rooms B105 and 106!”

“You fucking pussy traitor!” shrieked the tech who had hail HYDRA’d earlier. Natasha rolled her eyes and knocked him out. He obviously wasn’t going to be helpful.

“And the Winter Soldier project?” she prompted.

“The Soldier isn’t here! Please—”

“I know that. What about when he _was_ here?”

“I don’t—I’ve never—D255, I think? Or maybe D240? Somewhere down there anyway. Please don’t kill me.”

“Ask him about a map,” suggested Steve. 

One of the computers dinged politely, and displayed a floor map of the facility. JARVIS’s smooth voice came out of the speakers. “Pardon me, Captain Rogers. I am extracting this facility’s data for analysis and review. I have found a map of the facility. Video feeds are not available for the whole facility, so I regret to inform you I cannot provide more complete intelligence. I have engaged override locks to quarantine any remaining HYDRA agents.”

“JARVIS, you’re the best,” said Steve with relief, and Natasha knocked the last tech out. She and Steve zip tied all of them before turning their attention to the map. 

“The records are in B105 and 106 according to that tech,” said Natasha, pointing at them on the map, where they were located towards the opposite end of the facility, down along the long, snaking corridor going left that they hadn’t taken when they had first gotten out of the elevator. “D240 and D255 were for the Winter Soldier Project, and they are…over here.” Further along the passage they were already on. A lot further. This godforsaken mine went long and deep. A tomb within a deeper tomb for James, if he had been in cryo here.

Steve looked grim at the distance between the records rooms and the others. “We’re going to have to split up. It’s a risk if there are still a lot of hostiles, but JARVIS said he locked down the base, and I don’t think we can afford the time to clear them together. If HYDRA reinforcements are coming, or if Bucky—”

“No, you’re right. You take the records rooms, I’ll take D240 and 255.” Natasha could see Steve wasn’t thrilled with that. “Listen, you’ll be closer to the elevator, and you’re the better choice to secure it against attack.”

“Alright. Okay. We’ll meet back at the elevator. Check in over comms.” They moved back towards the closed doors of the ops room, behind which Steve indicated he could hear guards. With stealth no longer at issue, they could just shoot the guards, which Natasha did as soon as they opened the doors again, as Steve distracted them by barreling out shield-first. From there they split up, and Natasha headed towards the Winter Soldier rooms as quickly as she could manage without leaving herself open to attack.

When she ran into guards, she didn’t let them stop her forward momentum. She just dived and rolled, shooting them as she came up, or spun and dodged, and none of them could touch her. She kept going. The passage began to betray a distinctly downward slope: the facility was going yet deeper into the earth. She could hear pounding from some of the locked rooms she passed, screams and shouts from others, and ignored them. They weren’t important. She went further down still. At one point, the smell of brine grew so strong she nearly gagged with it. It wafted down a cramped looking corridor off the main one she was in, the faint sound of running water audible, but Natasha ignored that too. She had to get to the Winter Soldier rooms.

The downward slope began to even out, and a few minutes of brisk jogging later, Natasha finally reached D240. It wasn’t what she was looking for though: an armory and training room, likely where they put James through conditioning and training, nothing of interest there. She checked every room after D240, and found a small sleeping cell bare of anything but a bed and toilet and sink, an observation room, some showers…and there. Room D252 was undoubtedly the Winter Soldier prep room.

The ceiling was unpleasantly low, making the wide, oddly shaped room even more oppressive. The cryotank loomed malevolently in its confines. She knew it wasn’t on just from looking at it, that James wasn’t in there, but she stepped up to the little window in the cryotank anyway. It reminded her unpleasantly of a sarcophagus. Several tasteless jokes about the undead and mummies popped into her head, and while she knew Steve would just get the jaw clench of disapproval and eyebrow furrow of sadness, she knew James would have smirked and run with the joke. Fuck, she had to find the stupid transmitter.

There was a partially dismantled calibration chair here too, and Natasha skirted around it, going towards the alcove that housed an examination table and more equipment instead. Judging by the instruments and equipment, this must have been where they worked on James’ metal arm. She rummaged through the drawers and cabinets in the alcove, on the look out for anything that resembled the transmitter. She found assorted screwdrivers, things that looked like dental instruments, a small blowtorch…She moved on to the next set of drawers: some medical supplies, syringes, drugs. The rest of the drawers were more of the same. 

But there, in one of the cabinets: a safe. If the transmitter was anywhere in this room, it would be here. She didn’t recognize the model of the safe. It had a keypad lock though, so she tried her phone out on it. No joy. A brute force crack would take time she wasn’t sure they had.

“Rogers, status.”

“In the records room, still looking for the right files. I think I’ve almost—yeah, I’ve got it. You?”

“I’ve got a safe here, I’ll need time to crack it.”

“Not sure we got that kind of time. Anyone topside can hold the elevator and trap us down here, and we’ve gotta be coming up on a shift change by now.”

“Shit. Alright, I’ll work something out. Secure the elevator, I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

Natasha sat back on her heels and eyed the safe. She supposed she could take the whole thing with her, stick it on a cart and roll it out. They could worry about cracking it when they had cleared the facility. But then what if the transmitter wasn’t in the safe at all? She muscled the safe out of the cabinet, examined it from every angle. _Fuck it,_ she thought, and pried open the keypad to get at the electronic guts of the lock.

Natasha pulled out her lock picking supplies and got to work. If she could just fool the keypad into thinking the correct code had been entered…she gave herself fifteen minutes to get the safe open. If she didn’t have it by then, she’d take the whole thing with her and hope for the best.

At minute eleven, her fiddling with the wiring paid off. The lock disengaged and the safe opened. She pulled a flashlight from her belt and peered inside it: a gun, some glass bottles like those used to fill syringes, a few disks, a couple of thin hard copy files, and—there. A pager looking thing that matched the image of the transmitter from the memo Nick had found.

“Rogers, I’ve got it, I’ve got the transmitter. Headed back now.” She reached in to grab the transmitter and the disks, knocking one of the glass bottles over in her haste. It cracked and broke against the metal of the safe. The liquid in it seeped out, staining the files, and let off a bitter smelling gas as it made contact with the air. Natasha got a face full of it, bent over the safe as she was to retrieve the transmitter. _Uh oh_ , she thought, and scrambled away, transmitter in hand, one hand over her nose and mouth to keep from breathing any more in. 

It was too late though. The damage was done. Her eyes were burning and stinging, vision blurring, and air felt like fire in her throat. She had to get to Steve, to the elevator. She staggered out of the prep room into the hallway. Her vision was wobbling nightmarishly, making it look like the walls were breathing. She struggled to think, to come up with a plan, but rational thought was like catching smoke right now, and she could barely breathe—she scrabbled at her utility belt. Did she have one of those epi-pens for emergencies? What medical supplies did she have on her, she couldn’t—she couldn’t _think_. 

She looked back and saw that she had only managed to stagger as far as the training room she had searched earlier, and she still had what felt like miles to go. She wasn’t going to make it. Not when it felt like air wasn’t reaching her lungs and her vision was swimming and blacking out and her legs could barely carry her weight. She had enough presence of mind to think, _well this is an ignominious way for the Black Widow to die_ and _Steve is going to be so upset._ Her legs buckled then, but before her knees hit the ground, someone caught her from behind.

She flailed a barely responsive elbow behind her to get free and tried to get a grip to toss her assailant over her shoulders but—the arm around her waist was unyielding like—like metal—

“Shhh, Natasha, it’s me, it’s James,” said a beautifully familiar voice, and then she felt the prick of a needle in her neck, and everything went dark.

* * *

 

She floated in and out of half-consciousness, aware of her breath coming somewhat easier, and of being moved. She lost some time, and then there was sound, and pressure, and the air turned stale and dry.

_“I gave her the antidote already, it should keep her stable long enough—”_

_“Buck, are you—how long—”_

_“I’m fine, Steve.”_

_“Why didn’t you come to me earlier? I know you’re the one who pulled me from the river. I would have helped you, we could’ve worked together. We’re a team, Buck.”_

_“I had to be sure. I had to know there weren’t any other triggers or kill switches, I had to remember—”_

She sank back into the deep dark of true unconsciousness, only occasionally surfacing to feverish waking dreams or the sound of familiar voices. A cool hand, almost too cold, soothed her heated forehead and face, and she turned towards it.

_“Sergeant Barnes. You showed up in the nick of time. Stark take care of your little problem?”_

_“Yessir.”_

_“Settle down, Barnes. I’m not here to arrest you or anything. I haven’t been hauling ass all over Europe looking for the remote control to turn your kill switch off just to toss you in a dark hole afterwards.”_

_“No, I didn’t think so. Winter Soldier’s not much use in a prison.”_

_“Bucky, no one’s gonna—Nick, he’s not a weapon, you can’t—”_

_“I am not Alexander Pierce, Sergeant Barnes. I’d like a thorough debrief with you, you’ve probably got some valuable intelligence that we could sorely use to burn off more HYDRA heads. And I think you’d be a valuable addition to this team. But I won’t force you, and you’re free to go whenever you like. I’d take it as a kindness if you wait to leave until after Natasha wakes up though, I know she’d like to see you.”_

_A long silence. “I have shot literally every single person in this room. Why the hell would you want someone like me?”_

_“Well, no hard feelings. It was a pretty impressive shot.”_

_“Not that impressive. You’re still alive.”_

_“Bucky!”_

_“None of us have our hands clean, Sergeant Barnes. Your situation is partly SHIELD’s fault. I’d like to help make it right, if I can.”_

Natasha struggled to stay awake, because they were still talking, but the voices began to sound very distant as they dissolved into nonsense, and she sank back into sleep.

* * *

 

When Natasha woke, her first thought was, _huh. Still alive._ _That’s kind of a surprise._ She did the usual post-injury, newly conscious self-assessment: all limbs unbound and accounted for, IV in her hand, no serious injuries she could feel. It smelled like she was in a hospital room or infirmary, and she could hear at least one other person in the room with her. She felt fairly terrible, in that just getting over an illness way. But given that last she remembered, she’d been struggling to breathe and half-delirious, and—her thoughts slammed to a halt. She had heard James. She had felt James holding her. She thought she had heard James and Nick talking too. Had that been real?

She opened her eyes and saw Nick sitting at her bedside, which made her wince. He only did that when he was either really mad or really worried, or both. Judging by the stern set of his face, it was both.

“Good morning,” he greeted, then looked at his watch and corrected himself. “Or afternoon. We’re in Stark Tower. It’s been about 30 hours since you took a face full of some experimental HYDRA toxin. You got the antidote in time, you’re gonna be fine. Let’s take it as a given that I’m pretty goddamned annoyed that you nearly died from cracking a safe.”

Natasha opened her mouth to ask about Steve, about the mission, if they had a lead on James, how the hell she’d gotten out of that base, but only managed a frankly alarming croaking noise. Her throat felt like it was home to a hundred tiny needles. Nick brought her some water and moved her bed to a more upright position. The cold water soothed her throat some, enough for her to manage actual words.

“Who got me out?”

Nick smiled then, and it wasn’t his “fuck you” smile, or his “I’m going to fuck you up,” smile, or even his “I’m proud of you,” smile. It was the soft, real smile, and Natasha couldn’t remember the last time she had seen it. He gestured to the other side of the room, and Natasha turned her head to see James standing in the doorway.

And it was _James_ , in the doorway, her James and Steve’s Bucky, not the hollowed out Winter Soldier. Natasha could see that in a single glance. His expression was anything but blank, all his worry and hope and weariness writ large on his face. He looked a little gaunt and like he wasn’t getting much sleep, but he was clean-shaven and his hair was pulled back from his face, no signs of injury. Natasha still kind of thought he was the most handsome man she had ever seen. 

“Hi Natalia. I’m sorry, I don’t know if you—”

“Remember you? Come here, James.” He hesitated for a bare second, then strode to her bedside before stopping short, clearly uncertain of his welcome. She held out a hand, proud that it didn’t shake and betray the desperate, hopeful tremble of her heart. “I _said,_ come here.”

There were a lot of things she could say, things she wanted to say. _I’m sorry_ and _thank you_ and _I missed you, I think, even when I didn’t know who I was missing,_ and _I’m so glad you’re okay_. The words crowded her tongue and throat, and she let them out in the truest way she could just now, by yanking James in for a kiss as soon as he came within reach.

He made a small, startled noise against her lips, and then the familiarity of his mouth against hers overtook her. Natasha had kissed a lot of men, and some women, since she had last kissed James, some of them even on a repeat basis. Some part of her was always held apart during those kisses though, no matter how skillful or heated they were. No part of her was held apart now. James’ initial stiff surprise melted into tentative passion, and she knew then that he remembered her, that he understood what this kiss was saying. His right hand came up to cup her face, thumb caressing her cheek with almost intolerable tenderness. She had to pull away to catch her breath.

Natasha held his hand to her face a moment longer, and met James’ searching gaze. Nick cleared his throat, startling both of them. James, to Natasha’s utter delight, blushed and took a hasty step back. When she saw the look of indulgent fondness on Nick’s face, Natasha felt her own face heat too. 

“Lucky for you, and lucky for us, Sergeant Barnes here was on the hunt for that transmitter too, and he knew to have the antidote handy for any of HYDRA’s nasty little surprises. Exfil went by the book from there, and Stark got you medical transport back here. Doctors say you should be back to a hundred percent within a week, and that you should take it easy until then. And Barnes’ kill switch is no longer an issue. Now I gotta go let Hill yell at me a little, I’ll be back later for a proper debrief.” At that, Nick gave her one last warm look and swept out of the room just as Steve and Sam arrived.

Steve came bearing an aggressively cheerful bouquet of daisies, and what looked like a small stuffed animal. Sam had balloons that said CONGRATULATIONS! And, Natasha squinted at them, written in Sharpie under the congratulations was YOU’RE NOT DEAD! 

“Steven Grant Rogers, you _did not_ —” hissed James as Steve beamed at them. 

Natasha almost felt like shielding her eyes from the sheer force of his happiness. He set the daisies on the table by her bed, and dodged James’ dive for the stuffed animal. A brief scuffle ensued, and Natasha watched with no small amount of awe as actual superhero Captain America and the dreaded Winter Soldier tussled like literal children. The long-suffering, yet also vaguely baffled and delighted look on Sam’s face suggested such behavior was not new to him.

Sam inched past Steve and James to set the balloons on her bedside table. “Yeah, it’s basically been this and a lot of hugging and crying for the past day or so,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’m getting over a godawful flu,” she answered, eyes still on Steve and James as she waited for an opening. That stuffed animal _would_ be hers. Sam raised his hands in an “I want nothing to do with this,” gesture and stepped back.

Natasha lunged for the stuffed animal at an opportune moment, snatching it from Steve’s hand as he twisted to keep it from James. Their roughhousing turned into what looked like an overly aggressive hug that involved pinching, judging by Steve’s yelp, and Natasha ignored them in favor of inspecting her bounty.

The teddy bear looked vaguely familiar: it was a standard brown teddy bear, with a black mask over the eyes, and a cute blue coat and pants. Was it from some cartoon? Or maybe a comic—

“It’s a Bucky Bear!” Steve had maneuvered so that he was now holding on to a distinctly aggrieved looking James. “You know how they made Captain America comics? Well, Bucky was in them too, and they made a little teddy bear version of him for the kids.” James muttered something indistinct about how ridiculous it was, but made no move to retrieve the bear.

Natasha ran her fingers over the buttons on Bucky Bear’s coat, a coat that was the same shade of blue as James’ Howling Commando uniform. Now she remembered. She’d seen one of these at the Smithsonian exhibit. She was helplessly charmed by the little bear, by the whole situation: Steve having got one for her, James being so embarrassed, both Steve and James looking lighter together than she’d ever seen them be apart.

“I love it. Thank you, Steve.” She smiled at Steve, who ducked his head and blushed.

James frowned at the sound of her still wrecked voice. “Your throat sounds awful,” he said and extricated himself from Steve’s arms to bring her more water. 

The room subsided into awkward silence as she sipped on the water and studied James. She still had a lot of questions for him. What had he been doing since Insight? How much did he remember? Was he doing as well as he seemed to be doing? Was he going to stay? Steve glanced between them, and James did something with his eyebrows at Steve, which was apparently Steve and Sam’s signal to leave.

“Right! I hope you feel better soon, Natasha! We’re just gonna—” he gestured vaguely at the door and beat a hasty retreat, pulling Sam with him. Natasha raised an expectant eyebrow at James, who moved closer to perch on the bed. He looked like he was steeling himself to say something.

“I’m sorry. For—for Odessa and the thing on the bridge in DC and for getting us caught in the Red Room.”

“James, none of that is your fault.”

He shook his head, eyes fixed on the bedspread. “Please. I gotta say it. You were the only thing that made me feel human then, Natasha. You can’t know how grateful I am for that. I don’t now how much you remember, but I’ve got most of it back now, even if I’m a total fucking mess—and I’m trying to do right. Whatever we were to each other then, I don’t expect anything now. You don’t have to—”

“Thought I made myself pretty clear, Soldier,” she said, bringing a hand to his cheek. “I remember enough. I remember you.” He met her eyes, and his mouth twisted in that way it did when he didn’t know what to say.

“I’m not who I was, Natalia. Hell, I’m not sure who I am now.”

“I’m not who I was either. But hey, I don’t think we were ever properly introduced. I’m Natasha Romanoff.”

A slow smile began to bloom on his face. “Pleased to meet you. My name’s James Buchanan Barnes. My friends call me Bucky.”

“That’s a ridiculous nickname, you share it with a stuffed bear for god’s sake. I think I’ll call you James, if it’s all the same to you.”

“You can call me James,” he said, clearly amused. Then, quietly, “Natasha, though? Isn’t that a nickname too?”

“Yeah. Years ago, someone I loved very much named me that. Guess it stuck.” James let out a slightly incredulous, teary laugh at that, his eyes crinkling at the corners with the force of his smile, and his laugh was exactly as she had remembered it all those weeks ago at the Smithsonian. When he pulled her into a kiss, she couldn’t stop smiling.

 


	2. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This epilogue is pretty optional, it's mostly just here because I wanted to write a bit of date night fluff for Bucky and Natasha. Consider it my overlong version of "And they lived happily ever after."

Natasha stood in front of her dresser, debating whether or not to wear earrings. She had picked her dress out without hesitation (green, full skirt that left plenty of room for a couple of knife sheaths, a sweetheart neckline), yet here she was dithering over jewelry. She wondered if James was agonizing over what color shirt to wear, or whether or not to wear a tie. He was a snazzy dresser when given the choice, which was something of a surprise to Natasha, who was used to seeing him in combat gear or the kind of unremarkable clothes meant for blending into a crowd. There were a lot of things about James that were a surprise, and over the past seven months, Natasha had discovered all of them with a genuine wonder that she had long thought she was too old for. 

One such surprise was James’ insistence on date night. Natasha hadn’t had any concrete expectations when it came to her relationship with James. Mostly, she had thought that if he was ready for it, they’d end up in a relationship not unlike the one they’d had in the Red Room, sans secrecy and brainwashing. They’d go on missions, James having agreed to work with the Avengers and what was left of SHIELD to wipe out HYDRA, and they’d spend time together and have sex, and if it wasn’t going to be strictly speaking _casual_ , neither would it be till-death-do-us-part. Natasha would have been perfectly content with that. Hell, Natasha would have been perfectly content to just be a friend to James while he, as he put it, “got his head straight.” She knew what that was like after all. James, however, had different ideas. Slightly old-fashioned ideas.

A couple months after he had come home, he had showed up at her door wearing a very nice suit and a somewhat abashed expression.

“What’s this about?” she had asked, running a very appreciative eye over the dark gray suit. The color made his eyes look very blue.

“I wanna take you on a date, if that’s alright.” 

“I’m kind of a sure thing, James. We can just stay in…” she had said, reeling him in for a kiss. He had come willingly, and kissed her slow and sweet and easy, the familiarity of him perversely thrilling to her like usual. 

“Not that that isn’t tempting, but I actually really want to take you on a date,” he had said after pulling back from their kiss.

“Okay. Where are we going?”

He had grinned, suddenly boyish and charming. “Put on your dancing shoes, sweetheart, and wear something nice.” 

And so she had, and they had gone out for a very nice dinner, and then dancing, and it had been fun. At first, it had felt like another mission. James had scoped the exits at the restaurant, and Natasha had assessed the patrons like they were potential targets. But then James had visibly stopped himself, and fixed his attention on her for the rest of the night. Well, as much of his attention as was safe, and she had done her best to do the same. It had made her feel shy and awkward, and—not naked, not stripped bare, but—new. Young. And she knew from the soft look in his eyes that it had been the same for James. 

If that date night had been a one-off, or a rarity, Natasha would have been fine with that. She and James spent no shortage of time together after all. They went on missions, together and apart, and they spent a fair amount of their downtime together, often with Steve and Sam. When she and James spent time together alone, they did an awful lot of luxuriating in bed, doing all the things they had never had the time or safety to do before. They talked too: Natasha caught him up on her life, what she could remember anyway, and James told her about what he had been doing since Insight, and about his mostly recovered memories. The Serum, it turned out, worked wonders when given the chance to, and when James was free of drugs or wipes or other dubious treatments. 

What Natasha hadn’t hoped for or expected was the nice dinners out, the tickets to the ballet, the dancing, the going out to movies. She had done all these things with marks, and with the handful of people she had tried casually dating. A lot of those dates had been fun, sure, but they’d always felt like means to an end. They were either for the mission, or the way to justify sex. Dates with James weren’t like that. James was charmingly sincere about courting her, and Natasha was enchanted by it, by him, by how different things were from the Red Room. Being so lovesick was kind of embarrassing, but she was past caring.

Natasha shook herself free of her reverie and finally settled on a pair of earrings, just as James knocked on the door. When she met him at the door, they smiled stupidly at each other for a moment. 

“You look gorgeous,” he said.

“You too,” she answered, because he did. He was not wearing a tie, as it turned out, and it left the hollow of his throat tantalizingly bare in the dark blue dress shirt he was wearing. She had plans for that little bit of bare skin.

For tonight’s date, they were headed to an Indian restaurant (James’ pick, latest on his list of foods to try in the future), and then to a club for a night of sweaty, modern-style dancing (Natasha’s pick, because she really wanted to see the look on James’ face when he was introduced to grinding on the dance floor). They hadn’t seen each other in a few days, so dinner was taken up with a steady flow of conversation about what they’d been doing, and about James’ latest discoveries about the future. 

It turned out Steve had been right, when he had said James would have been excited about the future. James’ enthusiasm for modern technology had certainly endeared him to Tony, even if they did have arguments about flying cars and why there wasn’t a colony on the moon yet. Natasha for her part updated James on her quest to befriend the stray cat that slinked around Clint’s building, where she was filling in as super while Clint was off communing with the corn in Iowa. The cat was an ornery thing that looked like it had been through the proverbial wars, but he had consented to let her pet him the other day, an achievement Natasha was unreasonably proud of.

They walked the few blocks to the club, James looking more and more adorably dubious about it the closer they got. She had picked one of the most obnoxiously modern, on-trend clubs she could find, whose theme was some muddled mix of speakeasy and bacchanal, and music that was more bass line than anything else. The look of awe and horror on James’ face once they got inside made Natasha cackle. The dance floor was packed tight with strobe-lit bodies writhing and grinding and jumping to the pounding of the music. 

“Is this how the kids do it nowadays?” he murmured into her ear, and she could feel his smirk before she turned to look at him.

“Yeah, gramps. Are you scandalized?” He snorted and shook his head in response. 

“Well, lead the way, Natasha,” he said, so she took his hand in hers and tipped her head towards the bar at the opposite end of the club.

They wound through the crowd towards the bar, scoping out the club along the way: the exits, the bouncers, the civilians. There was nothing that struck either of them as being particularly dangerous. Natasha had been prepared for a quick retreat, in case the club was too much for James, but James’ body language was his default state of relaxed alertness, just enough danger in it that people found themselves leaving them a path without entirely knowing why. The only thing that betrayed any discomfort was some tension around his eyes; she guessed the lights and crowd were bothering him some, and put a time limit of a couple of hours on this excursion.

James cleared them a space at the bar, where they ordered their drinks and settled in for some people watching. Natasha had started this particular ritual, one of her own habits that dovetailed neatly with James’ preference for vigilance and his curiosity about the modern world. They traded guesses and stories about the people in the club.

“That couple is going to break up soon,” said Natasha of one couple whose eyes wandered to everyone but each other while they danced.

James nodded at a slick-looking guy who was approaching a group of women with (in Natasha’s opinion) somewhat unwarranted confidence. “He’s gonna try for the blonde, even though he really only has a shot with the brunette.” Sure enough, the blonde smiled and turned away from the guy, and the brunette paused before joining her friends as they waded into the mass of bodies on the dance floor.

They sipped on their drinks and kept people watching, James growing increasingly unimpressed by what passed for dancing in the club scene. Meanwhile, Natasha was noticing something else going on in the VIP booths around the periphery of the dance floor. She set her drink down and stood up, tugging James up with her.

“Think you got the hang of this newfangled modern dancing yet?”

“Doesn’t seem like there’s much to it,” he said, voice low and teasing, and a smirk on his lips that made her want to put his mouth to other uses.

She led him to the dance floor, moving him towards the edge near the booths, and then twined her arms around his neck and settled in to show him the highlights of modern dancing. His hands settled on her hips, and he moved to the beat easily, nothing self-conscious about it. She gave herself the length of two songs to enjoy it, to enjoy the ease of their bodies: his hands on her, the easy, synchronized movement of their hips. To enjoy the feeling of being an anonymous part of a crowd of people moving to the same beat. Then she maneuvered James around so he too had a proper look at the VIP booths.

“You up for a different kind of fun, Soldier?”

He grinned down at her. “We taking on the bratva now?” She beamed back up at him. Of course he had noticed. There was always some kind of organized crime presence in trendy clubs like this, and Natasha would have left it alone, but—

“We are when they’re trafficking girls.”

There was a slow but steady flow of clearly excited and anxious young women going from the VIP booth hosting the brava to a back room of the club. It was a pretty classic con: sponsor some visas for non-existent summer jobs, get them to the US, invite them for a night out and then—well, Natasha wasn’t about to let that happen. She was a goddamn superhero. 

“Hell yeah we are. So what’s the plan?” James’ eyes were bright and full of predatory mischief, his grin taking on a wicked cast.

There he was, she thought: Steve’s Bucky Barnes who waded into street fights with him and Natasha’s Soldier who always had her back. It filled Natasha with such a ferocious joy that she had to laugh, and James caught her mouth in a dirty kiss that was making some exciting promises about what they’d do when they got home. When they finally came up for air, she told him her plan, and they went to work.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Vozrozhdeniya Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vozrozhdeniya_Island) is, horrifyingly enough, a real place! We're all extremely lucky we haven't been killed by a death plague originating from it! Also a real place is the [Bochnia Salt Mine and Health Resort](http://www.kopalniasoli.pl/en), and it's probably a perfectly nice resort and not at all a front for evil science Nazis.


End file.
